My great ambition has always prevented me from doing anything.

Love, dear friends, begins with curiosity.

Modesty’s no credit to anyone-it’s just a social grace.

That’s the way people were. Nobody believed in the things you believed but yourself, nobody believed that even you were really sincere about it, people believed whatever was good business for them at the time. Nobody believed in anything but good business.

She would like to be on a train named Nightfall going to some place where she’d be twenty-five years old.

That’s why I ca never be happy with simple, good people”, she thought. “It isn’t enough to be honest and good-to be happy they must pretend. They really must!

It was not a jolly place at all for a sun-loving soul.

How serious is it to cut out that little section behind the brow that separates what a Nice Girl Sees and Hears from What Really Happens.

Oh, of course, it was a sad role, the lover no longer loving. But once the perfunctory sympathy was given him the heart went outfully to oneself, the real victim, the unloved.

What were you to do when you didn’t know anyone who could help you, no one who could explain the way to the things you wanted- what could you do- you couldn’t just take a spade, a few bricks, and a gerenium and see what happened. You had to be rich, you had to be educated; you had to be powerful to stop contagious ugliness from spreading.