Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.

And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.

Love was a terrible thing. You poisoned it and stabbed at it and knocked it down into the mud - well down - and it got up and staggered on, bleeding and muddy and awful. Like - like Rasputin.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.

My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.