Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

... how I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

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

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.