The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.