Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

Truly Alice, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will – that is all, really, education is about, should be about.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.