...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.