In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about.