The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.