"I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them."

“Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even a particular kind of writing.”

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”

“The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?”