Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.

She was incurably dishonest.

It's a mining town in lotus land.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.