... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

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.

Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.