There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.