There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.