The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.