Emotions and Feelings

Then I remember her comment on one friend who had lamed herself while in London. It was Mrs. Parker who voiced the suspicion that this poor lady had injured herself while sliding down a barrister.

[ Habitual response upon hearing the doorbell or telephone ring :] What fresh hell is this?

[ On women writers :] As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

[ Of an actress who was said to be kind to her inferiors :] Where does she find them?

[ Responding to a hostess being described as “outspoken” :] Outspoken by whom?

[ When told of the death of Calvin Coolidge :] How can they tell?

[ Of a cocktail party she had attended :] One more drink and I’d have been under the host!

[ Of a performance by Katharine Hepburn :] Let’s all go to see Miss Hepburn and hear her run the gamut of emotions from A to B!

[ Telegram to Mary Sherwood, who finally had her baby after a much-ballyhooed pregnancy, 1915 :]

[ When asked about the most beautiful words in the English language :] The ones I like . . . are “cheque” and “inclosed.”

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say No in any of them.

[ Her suggested epitaph for herself :] Excuse My Dust.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

[ Of Ernest Hemingway :] He has a capacity for enjoyment so vast that he gives away great chunks to those about him, and never even misses them. . . . He can take you to a bicycle race and make it raise your hair.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

It may be that this autobiography [Aimee Semple McPherson’s] is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.

[ Reviewing A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner in her “Constant Reader” column :] Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.

Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

It costs me never a stab nor squirm

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife , it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

[T. S. Eliot achieves] the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.