The young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there.

Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

"Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time-I might as well go home."

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

Once a change of direction has begun, even though it's the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of Tightness as if it had been a natural all along.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement-discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

Englishmen must have an island.