Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.

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.

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.

Except two breeds - the stupid and the narrowly feline - all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.

I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.