The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.