“(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.”

“My final thought now is that as in religion and the arts, so in politics; if men do not balance their feelings and intelligence they lose command of both - and worse still, of their object.”

“At Harvard I learned most uncomfortably that facts are facts. In Italy I learned that facts are the way you look at them.”

“There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed.”

“What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime?”

“Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.”

“...friendship is something you do.”