I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.

I understand what you are feeling,” he said. “As Socrates showed, love cannot be anything else but the love of the good. But to find the good is very rare. That is why love is rare, in spite of what people think. It happens to one in a thousand, and to that one it is a revelation. No wonder he cannot communicate with the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.

He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.

I mean exactly that,” Mr. Davison retorted. “You’ve hit the nail smack on the head. We pay a price for having money. People in my position” – he turned to Kay – “have ‘privilege.’ That’s what I read in the Nation and the New Republic.” Mrs. Davison nodded. “Good,” said Mr. Davison. “Now listen. The fellow who’s got privilege gives up some rights or ought to.

She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality.

It was the cocktail hour in Priss’s room at New York Hospital – terribly gay.

They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believing himself perfect, all had counted on the virtues of others to rescue them themselves.

The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.