He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.