Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process

love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel.

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?