One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.

I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way

I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.