[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.

All four Gospels agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality. One is obliged to say, "Here was a man. This could not have been invented.

Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.

Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made.

A young mistress is better than an old master.