They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

You can stroke people with words.

There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.