True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.