After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.