Reading has always been in the chief joy, a never-ending topic of conversation, and often a lifesaver, in my family.

Now I had lived long enough and had heard enough from urchins my age and from other slaves, to distrust the person who calls himself merciful, or just, or kindly. Usually these are the most cruel, niggardly and selfish people, and slaves learn to fear the master who prefaces his remarks with tributes to his own virtues.

Reading has always been in the chief joy, a never-ending topic of conversation, and often a lifesaver, in my family.

I was like many another who starts an intrigue timidly. Once into it, I had to go on, and therefore I had to harden my sensibilities.

The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.

And how to paint your lovely hands, fluttering over the silks like two dark birds?

Art should be truth; and truth, unadorned, unsentimentalized, is beauty.