When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.