''It is very easy to love alone.''
''Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.''
''Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore than name. Are they all alike. I think so.''
''It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.''
''From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.''
''I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.''
''It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.''
''Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.''
''The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.''
''Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it.''
''Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.''
''Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.''
''In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.''
''The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.''
''... governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting ...''
''Very likely education does not make very much difference.''
''Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.''
''Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.''
''Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.''
''War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.''
''Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.''
''A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.''
''A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.''
''Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.''
''A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.''
''I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.''
''It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she "allures" us to our death.''
''The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.''
''A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.''
''It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.''
''I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.''
''History takes time.... History makes memory.''
''All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.''
''In the United States there is more space where nobody is is than where anybody is.''
''One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.''
''The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.''
''Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.''
''The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.''
''As always art is the pulse of a nation.''
''Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.''
''A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.''
''The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.''
''It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.''
''... to a specialist his specialty is the whole of everything and if his specialty is in good order and it generally is then everything must be succeeding.''
''That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.''
''Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.''
''One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.''
''... living in England does not free the American the way living in France frees him because the french [sic] and the American do not have the sense of going on together, from the beginning they know that there is no going on together no past present and future ...''
''I think the reason I am important is that I know everything.''
''Remarks are not literature.''
''There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.''
''... nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.''
''... a master-piece ... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.''
''... to know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing ...''
''One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.''
''I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.''
''War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.''
''There is no such thing as being good to your wife.''
''College professors have two bad traits. They are logical and they are easily flattered.''
''Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer.''
''I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.''
''Native always means people who belong somewhere else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere because they think of everybody else as native.''
''Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.''
''Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.''
''Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.''
''It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.''
''Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.''
''Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.''
''If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.''
''Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.''
''Action and reaction are equal and opposite.''
''A house in the country is not the same as a country house.''
''Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.''
''Evolution was all over my chldhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution.''
''The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.''
''It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.''
''I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.''
''The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just.... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I I don't understand.''
''... the one thing that everybody wants is to be free, to talk to eat to drink to walk to think, to please, to wish, and to do it now.''
''Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.''
''Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.''
''There are two kinds of liars the kind that lie and thekind that don't lie the kind that lie are no good.''
''If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.''
''Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.''
''French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.''
''The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.''
''Think of the Bible think of Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.''
''What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.''
''It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.''
''It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.''
''There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.''
''Men ... are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and ... they are so ugly, and ... they are gullible, anybody can convince them.''
''Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.''
''I cannot give advice. How can I when I do not authorise success. I authorise it alright. Smile.''
''Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.''
''I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.''
''There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.''
''Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.''
''What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.''
''The essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening but and this is very important very important indeed talking has nothing to do with creation.''
''A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.''
''Romance is everything.''
''The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.''
''The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.''
''... the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.''
''If nobody knows you that does not argue that you be unknown, nobody knew Ida when they no longer lived in Boston but that did not mean that she was unknown.''
''Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.''
''One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.''
''I tell you boys there aint any answer, just you believe me, there aint any answer,... there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.''
''In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.''
