Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Life, for all its agonies...is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing...and whatever is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again.

So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

Happiness isn't always easy, " he'd said. "But it's a priority.

Once she kissed me, my heart slowed, and every muscle in my body relaxed. How much I needed her terrified me. -pg 252/ARC

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

A woman is perturbed by what a man forgets---a man by what a woman remembers.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

I never claimed to be anything more than a nice guy and an athlete.

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.

When we are young, parents and teachers tell us we can do anything and become whatever we want. But as we grow older, these same people tell us we must be more realistic.

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.