There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!

To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

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