They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.