“It's commonly believed that there's less pressure on a woman to be married these days than there used to be. If that's true, if things are better now than they were before, then they once must have been very bad indeed.”

“It must have been perfectly dreadful to see a woman every day for five years, and not give her a pie, when you felt sure yours were better than she could make.”

“Don't look now, but that's my ex over there."Surely I'm not the only one who takes "don't look now" as "there's no better time than now." I looked."Bad, Ali!" Another slap to my arm. "Bad, bad, bad Ali! Have you no self control?”

“He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.”

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

“What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality.”