I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good bre...eding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily bette...r than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there ...entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and ...water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the ...Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which... tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: "Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think," and the like.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity..., that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the ...creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle,--and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet order ing, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides herself,--of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the... adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »