One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emot… - Mary McCarthy

You never learn a language unless you use it.

Art had a disquieting power of producing social embarrassment; […] it caused people to make silly remarks and then laugh self-consciously, as if the pictures, which knew better, could hear them. It could not be just ignorance; displays of armor and mummies and natural-history exhibits did not have that effect. […] If you were with art long enough, […] you began to get the feeling that it was looking right at you.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado.