It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. ‘Yes, I see, dear; it’s about half-way between,’ Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.