We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

Things are always different from what they might be.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.