Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.

One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.