Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft.

Teaching is the royal road to learning.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.