Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar and mercantile hurly-burly of the great world, the idyllic pleasures of the domestic hearth-the which, I firmly believe, make of one small room an everywhere, indeed; and provide us with that small measure of bliss, which is, if we are greatly fortunate, and deserving, Our Lord's promise to us, of the Heaven to come.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.