You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart.

Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.

All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.

Death is loneliness in its purest form.

Those who give the orders are not the ones to die The people who are doing the work and the fighting and the dying, and those who are doing the talking, are not all the same people.

[On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid...Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden, and so on. I gave one look at it all, returned to the hotel and went to bed and wept bitterly for eleven hours...Why? Because I had seen Paris and could not endure the thought of being anywhere else.