You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
It isn’t silence you can cut with a knife any more, it’s interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.
Home was quite a place when people stayed there.
I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.
Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
We stand or fall by television.
I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.
I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
I don’t understand it, and I don’t like what I don’t understand.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.
The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.
I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.
Wilbur didn’t want food, he wanted love.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.
Good deeds never go unpunished.
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.