I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

... I used words without precautions. I wanted to disappear into them, I fled into the bovaryism of the writer trying to create an effect.

Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

giving the utmost of herself to three absorbing interests [marriage, motherhood, career] ... was a problem for a superwoman, and a job for a superwoman, and only some such fabled being could have accomplished it with success.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.