The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

The complex develops out of the simple.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.