I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.