Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

Yes,” said Mamma, “this is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.