The erotic element always present in fashion, the kiss of loving labor on the body, is now overtly expressed by language. Belts hug or clasp; necklines plunge; jerseys bind. The word exciting tingles everywhere.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.

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 fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.