Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call 'inhuman,' revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.