Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide.

With intellectuals, moral thought is often less a tonic that quickens ethical action than a narcotic that deadens it.

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.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to Advertising copy.