But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.