always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew.

Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband.

The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.

Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys.

Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.

Americans were people who wanted to leave every place better than they found it, to leave every man more of a man than they found him. ... Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable - it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door.

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.