Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

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.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.