If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life

Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.