The perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.

Everything tender and melancholy - as life is sometimes, just for one moment.

All of a writer that matters is in the book or books. It is idiotic to be curious about the person.

I have tried," I said, "but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now" (it is always too late for truth, I thought).

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.