The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

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

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

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

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?

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