As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.