Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.