I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.