Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Are not beauty and delicacy the same?

It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.