To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind ... To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.

At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.