"He longed to make a mark, or, to express it more vulgarly, cut a figure. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the number of figures which can be cut in the world is practically unlimited; the only difficulty is to cut precisely the kind of figure one would wish."

"... there was never a woman so ill-suited to public life as I am. I have had to whip myself, as it were, into society, and the loneliness of it all has been terrific."

"Ah, it is silliness to pass a wolf because one is hunting foxes."

"... I had rather sleep and eat and dance Than hear a nightingale any day o' the week!"

"Reader. But where are the Unities? Author. In life there are no Unities, but three Incomprehensibles: Destiny, Man, and Woman."

"He did not speak again till just before he died, when he kissed his wife’s hand with singular tenderness and called her "Elizabeth." She had been christened Augusta Frederica; but then, as the doctors explained, dying men often make these mistakes."

"College, after all, was a place where one had most of the privileges of adulthood and very few of the responsibilities. Who wouldn’t want to stay there forever if one could?"

"“Let me guess. Las Vegas had time machines as well.” “No,” said Price, “but they had something just as troublesome: the Treasury Department.”"

"As a journalist, he was used to being lied to."

"I now know the answer to the riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg? The correct answer is, “Yes.”"

"“You’re a theoretician. I’m more at home in applied physics.” He reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “Ah yes, the great divide in physics. It’s like the nature versus nurture arguments the biologists and psychologists have.” “I wonder what they argue about in the chemistry department,” I wondered. “Probably who has to pick up the check, if they’re anything like the professors I know. If it doesn’t smell or blow up, they seem more interested in mixing drinks than chemicals.”"

"Don’t underestimate the power of nerds with access to Internet search engines."

"You’ve heard of “Rocks for Jocks,” the gimme course that departments of geology often offer? The physics department offering was called—among the faculty, anyway, “Quarks for Dorks.” Lucky me, I got to teach it."

"I got what he was saying. It wasn’t just about crunching numbers. It was about understanding them. It was about seeing the unexpected connections."

"There are times when you’re incredibly sensitive and insightful. This isn’t one of them."

"All we can do is go around telling the truth."

"The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."

"Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness."

"I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know."

"Wherever you look there's meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean."

"I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land."

"Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto."

"The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things."

"Next to music beer was best."

"If you walk along the main street on an August afternoon there is nothing whatsoever to do."

"The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow."

"The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear."

"It is far better for the profits of our purse to be taken from us than to be robbed of the riches of our minds and souls."

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

"Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them."

"This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in the doorways, and she was afraid."

"It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."

"In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise."

"She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."

"And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"

"I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?"

"My cousin Cleofante does not believe in inspiration. She shuns the false energy of all stimulants, even those of criticism and sympathy, when she sets herself to a task. What she does, she does alone—unencouraged, unadvised, unmoved. She has a man’s broad and vital technique, and a man’s ability for thinking straight and far. For years I have watched her work,—coldly, intelligently, solely with the power of her brain,—achieving effects that are in no way miracles, but are matters of technique and deliberation."

"Like a fool I thought I was the arbiter of her destiny; and all the time Fate had happier plans for her."

"Work alone qualifies us for life, Sentoni. It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit."

"My life is like water that has gone over the dam and turned no mill wheels. Here I am, not happy, but not unhappy, as my days run on to the sea, idly—but not too swiftly—for I love living."

"To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible!"

"Englishmen are like that. They love life more and value it less than any other people in the world."

"... there's a great strangeness about love. ... Yes, I'm very sure that love is the strangest thing in the world—much stranger than death—or—or just life."

"I am the wind that wavers, You are the certain land; I am the shadow that passes Over the sand."

"It's all right to tell a wife the brutal truth, but you've got to go sort of easy with your lady-love."

"The Greeks had a word for it."

"Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that—but that's the only way one can stay married."

"This world is a very unsafe place. It's all shifting sands, Ned. Shifting sands and changing winds."

"And have we lost the right To look on a blooming bough Without remembering how Once with high promising We were a part of spring— We who are now the dead Leaves of other years strewn where flowers spread?"

"Mine was a love so exquisite that I Rather than watch it wither chose to die: So dress my grave, O friend, with no poor flower Which in your quiet garden blooms an hour!"