"I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can't stand it. Though—I don't know. Some queers I really liked. As long as they didn't try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer."

"“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”"

"Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it."

"But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes"

"She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

"Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure."

"The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory."

"The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell."

"A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."

"It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."

"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year."

"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

"Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's."

"It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do."

"Bolivar cannot carry double"

"Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it. During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion. In the case of Lorison, his particular ethics positively forbade him to declare his sentiments, but he must needs dally with the subject, and woo by innuendo at least."

"It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York."

"Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle."

"East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State."

"A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience."

"She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership)."

"You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a women's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town."

"History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women."

"What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?"

"If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York."

"She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm — always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety."

"Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper."

"It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are."

"Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham."

"I know you. I have heard of you all my life. I know now what a scourge you have been to your country. Instead of killing fools you have been murdering the youth and genius that are necessary to make a people live and grow great. You are a fool yourself, Holmes; you began killing off the brightest and best of our countrymen three generations ago, when the old and obsolete standards of society and honor and orthodoxy were narrow and bigoted. You proved that when you put your murderous mark upon my friend Kerner — the wisest chap I ever knew in my life."

"Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions. He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner."

"I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair."

"He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienist and the florist."

"In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches."

"There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference."

"Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills."

"The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey."

"Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines."

"The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home."

"If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry."

"The magi, as you know, were wise men — wonderfully wise men — who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi."

"There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating."

"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas."

"Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million.""

"Take it from me — he's got the goods."

"A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows."

"A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else."

"Turn up the lights — I don't want to go home in the dark."

"Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws."

"Melville was a born romancer. One cannot account for the success of his early romances by saying that in the Great South Sea he had found and worked a new field for romance, since evidently it was not his experience in the South Sea that had led him to romance, but the irresistible attraction that romance had over him that led him to the South Sea. He was able not only to feel but to interpret that charm, as it never had been interpreted before, as it never has been interpreted since."