... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

... the whole of society in Washington is to some degree political. It is like no other capital city known to me, in that political thinking, the whole business, technical and personal, of politics, is not diluted by an equal interest in art, industry, amusement, anything you like. I don't meant that these are non-existent in Washington -- only that they are subdued to the ruling passion.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.