If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again.

Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.