The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

Jewish prayers are mostly about daily things - the sliver of a new moon, dew on the grass, the bread and the wine.