To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")