I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.