But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.