And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

No nice men are good at getting taxis.

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

I yield to no one in my admiration for the office as a social center, but it's no place actually to get any work done.

I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.