“We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.”

“You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.”

“And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.”

“But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.”

“Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.”

“What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?”

“Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper”