I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Lord, if there is a heartache Vienna cannot cure I hope never to feel it. I came home cured of everything except Vienna.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

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