How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said.

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly... But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

It happens to be one of those days when I see everybody in the family, including myself, through the wrong end of a telescope.

Oh, it's lovely to see you!' Franny said as the cab moved off. 'I've missed you.' The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn't mean them at all.

I feel overwhelmingly grateful to them, but I don't know what to do with their invisible gifts.

My god, there's absolutely nothing tenth-rate about you, and yet you're up to your neck at this minute in tenth-rate thinking.

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.