There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.