... the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.