He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.

You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.

Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates.

One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me.

In love and mating, ambience is central.

There is no permanent friendship between men, among men. Something goes wrong, somebody marries the wrong person, somebody advances too fast, somebody converts, somebody refuses good advice or bad advice, it didn’t matter. It went up in a flash.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything.

Nina said, “Have regular facial expressions.” That was a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods.

What a datum! I couldn’t help thinking over and over.