Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

You can stroke people with words.

good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handle with gloves.

Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.