In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.