Hepzibah sets up shop in "The House of Seven Gables"

"With a beating heart, she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame, that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognising that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native squeamishness, as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief."

An Existentialist explains sleeping on a train: More from Simone de Beauvoir's American diaries

In a train's sleeping berth:
The tension and fatigue entailed in every existence originate in other, larger forms of existence; in these berths, stacked on either side of the corridor, like tombs in the galleries of the catacombs, each person achieves an absolute solitude. This nocturnal dwelling evokes the peace of the funeral chambers of Mycenae and Cerveteri; no appeal from the outside world can penetrate here. My life is no longer pulled in different directions or tied to anyone or anything; it is closed in on itself in the silence of death. I turn off the lights and shut my eyes. I feel the rhythmic movement of teh train as it rolls into the unknown; this movement also brings me peace- the peace of an alibi. Not only am I separated from everything, but I am not situated at any particular spot in the universe. I'm just passing through. the sleep that pulls me from this world is in harmony with the rolling of the train, which minute by minute denies me my unique place in it.

Simone de Beauvoir in America

From the marvelous diaries kept while in the U.S., January to May 1947....
"what makes daily life so agreeable in America is the good humor and friendliness of Americans...(but) this amiability is disconcerting. The respect granted the citizen is completely abstract; the same polite smile that assures David Brown that he is a unique individual will also gratify John William s who is unique too. Nothing is more universal than this singularity recognized with such ceremony. One suspects a hoax. Nonetheless, thanks to these considerations, the American doesn't need to strain to feel his human dignity. It may be commercial but the cordiality of salespeople is never servile. They are not bitter or stiff, and though it is encouraged by self-interest, their kindnes is no less real. We've held German soldiers responsible for the wayy they carried out orders of extreme cruelty- and in fact, man is never passive. In obeying he commits his freedom, and submitting to evil is a way of reclaiming it for himself. Most of the time he reclaims it through inventions and initiatives that make his responsibility apparent. Likewise the American citizen does not submit passively to the propaganda of the smile; on a foundation of of obligatory optimism, it is really he who freely presents himself as cordial, trusting and generous. His kindness is less suspect the less interested he is in the success of the system- he is more duped than duping. p 24

Stanley Kauffmann on Chaplin

Stanley Kauffmann on Paulette Goddard in "The Great Dictator" from Stanley Kauffmann's "A World on Film":
All the Good people are GOOD; and when they escape they settle on a storybook farm where they dine at an outdoor table under a grape arbor in a picture so itchily pretty it would give Currier the Ives.

A sunny day

I was able to finish my Chesterfield sofa. Because of the extensive tufting, painting the areas that are folded out of sight was nightmarish. I would pull the wrinkles out and run a paintbrush along them and then discover a dozen that I had overlooked. It was like painting a Shar-Pei.

From "Pragmatism"

Quoted in "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"
In Pragmatism, published a year after the quake, he wrote, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.”

and

“to anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent”—and he had done both—“the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life’s purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.”