Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

A German joke is no laughing matter.

The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.

Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.