Every year, in the deep midwinter, there descends upon this world a terrible fortnight. ... every shop is a choked mass of humanity ... nerves are jangled and frayed, purses emptied to no purposes, all amusements and all occupations suspended in favor of frightful businesses with brown paper, string, letters, cards, stamps, and crammed post offices. This period is doubtless a foretaste of whatever purgatory lies in store for human creatures.

Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.

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.

God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

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

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.