A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.