Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy

It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. Gossip is the tool of the poet, the shop-talk of the scientist, and the consolation of the housewife, wit, tycoon and intellectual. It begins in the nursery and ends when speech is past.

It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.