Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

I don’t know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting.

Beware of monotony; it’s the mother of all the deadly sins.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.

There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ’em out.

If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.

When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.