“The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.”

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

I’m scared of the day I turn 19. I really don’t want to grow past 18.

When I’m, like, 30, I want to go off the map, have a family and live in Malibu with a farm, and just raise my own chickens.

From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

I don’t have any issues with my age.

I don’t want to be made to look like I’m 25. I’m 39. I don’t have any issues with my age.

I’ve been in the public eye for about 15 or 16 years and I’m very aware that fame is not a given. I have to maintain it. It’s not just something that will always be there.