“Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.”

“Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.”

“Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.”

“Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.”

“There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.”

“In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.”

“It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.”