The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.

The unsuccessful bully can always become the father of a family.