There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

I do not think women understand how repelled a man feels when he sees a woman wholly absorbed in what she is thinking, unless it is about her child, or her husband, or her lover. It ... gives one gooseflesh.

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

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