Biology is destiny only for girls.

Art is a profession, not a shrine.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality.

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.