Domesticity is essentially drama, for drama is conflict, and the home compels conflict by its concentration of active personalities in a small area. The real objection to domesticity is that it is too exciting.

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.

a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.

It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.

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