“If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.”

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”

“But we're so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.”

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”

“In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.”

“If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.”

“...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers...”