You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

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.

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited.

Very rare, the intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the whimsical brain is less rare, less attaching, sometimes tedious.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.