There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

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

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.

Habit is necessary. It is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.