It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

Someone who gossips well has a reputation for being good company or even a wit, never for being a gossip.

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?

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

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

It is disgusting to pick your teeth; what is vulgar is to use a gold toothpick.

Humor simultaneously wounds and heals, indicts and pardons, diminishes and enlarges; it constitutes inner growth at the expense of outer gain, and those who possess and honestly practice it make themselves more through a willingness to make themselves less.