She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

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.

Unhappy people are dangerous.