The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

However much we may feel for the misery of someone close to us, we always act with some artificiality in their presence. We hold-back from telling them everything we think, often because we do not genuinely mean what we say; or because we take a pleasure in their plight, thankful that we are not affected.

Against war one might say that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In its favor, that in producing these two effects it barbarizes, and so makes the combatants more natural. For culture it is a sleep or a wintertime, and man emerges from it stronger for good and for evil.

The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us