Some things are best mended by a break.

...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.