There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

... it is nearly impossible to understand those who are beyond our sight, who are not explained to us by ties of birth or the contact of the flesh.

In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.