After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

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?

Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.

Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.

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