I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.

All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper's brain, and he is with them, and part of them.

When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.

Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.

Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

How lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman.