I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

I talk with the authority of failure - Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting - it's going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.

...for a moment people set down their glasses in county clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams.

When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.