To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

It really takes a hero to live any kind of spiritual life without religious belief.

The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the brother of talk after dinner.

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.