She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.