“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.”

“You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.”

“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.”

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

“It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.”

“You can fool too many people, too much of the time.”

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