[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.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.

If we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all. ... Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

We have this mistaken notion that everybody in the world has to go to college. The colleges are already crowded with people who never in this world will absorb more than a rudimentary education, and we dilute everything to meet this low standard.