Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.