I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

One cares so little for the style in which one's praises are written.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.