I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.

One doesn’t become a witch to run around being helpful either…. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.

[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.

cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.

There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.

Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist as a scatter of senses.