It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

She can be a nightmare, but this still feels better than any dream.

I’d never known it was possible to love as he did— with complete devotion yet devoid of promises.

In educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

Life without risks is not worth living.

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

Desire is an attempt to feel the void.

I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.

I want to open my own yoga studio. Planning construction and looking at properties is fun.

Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets.