Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.

In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilization.

She had a passion for secrecy, but she herself was merely a Sphinx without a secret.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.

Just because a man has died for it, does not make it true.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.