Is not life a hundred times too short - for boredom?
There had often been Jeremiahs in the [Princeton] applicant pool. They were attractive to the faculty, who some years earlier had flatly asked for more of them: fewer golden kids who did everything well, please, and more awkward kids who were brilliant but couldn't tie their shoes. The faculty themselves, she suspected, had once been awkward, brilliant kids who couldn't tie their shoes.
[Written in 1886] The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for dominion of the earth - the compulsion to large-scale politics.
There was no overt or subtle condemnation. She was [my mother] Vivian Baxter Jackson. Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.
Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure: it was the masterpiece of English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English begin unconsciously to lust again for their work- and week-day.
"Do you want to marry him?"
"No."
"Does he want to marry you?" The father had stopped speaking to me during my fourth month.
"No."
"Well, that's that. No use ruining three lives."
In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.
In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.
