The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

The male cannot bear very much humiliation; and he really cannot bear it, it obliterates him.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one--you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at themercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.