France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man's silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed. They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their platinum wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans and opera cloaks; meanwhile digesting the sandwiches and Sundaes they had eaten for lunch.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.