[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.