Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.