After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.

I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.