Life is made up of compromises.
Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.
Damn words; they’re just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn’t have to think in words...
When a man says he doesn’t understand a woman it’s because he won’t take the trouble.
Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.
Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care.
I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them...
Everybody who does anything at all does too much.
Life’s just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.
One cares so little for the style in which one’s praises are written.
In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
Mothers and daughters are part of each other’s consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
I was never allowed to read the popular American children’s books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author’s knowing it.
To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!
Some things are best mended by a break.