There is nothing so debilitating to a naturally weak sense of humor as selling tickets behind a grating.

the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.

You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with.

Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues.

It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.

One cannot see callers, answer the telephone, go to luncheons or dinners, visit the dentist or shoemaker, address charitable organizations in or from a bed; therefore a bed, in my experience, is simply bristling with ideas.