It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

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

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

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.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.