Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children — who plays the virtuous woman. . . . May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.