In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.

I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.