Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

The mark of a true crush... is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

Rumor and gossip, like sound itself, appear to travel by wave-effect, sheer preposterosity being no barrier.

Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it.

Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.