Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.