You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.