You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?