Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.