The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.