No future life could heal the degradation of having been a woman. Religion in the world had nothing but insults for women.

Real speech can only come from complete silence. Incomplete silence is as fussy as deliberate conversation.

In the midst of the happiness they brought there was always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden.

The joy of a party is the newness of people to each other, renewed strikingness of humanity. They love each other, to distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation and separate. ... The strangeness, and the hopes aroused by strangeness, are illusions. Mirages arising wherever people gather expectantly together.

Deep down in everyone was sorrow and certainty.

If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.

Marriage is not an institution, it is an intuition.