Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.