A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

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

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

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

A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.

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.