A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.