I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life — a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister...

Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their...

But Pierre had been born with a shrewdness that made him early aware that a failure to believe that human events were ordered by a higher power was regarded by many in the highest positions...

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband’s absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her novels like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath.

Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you’ll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.