Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

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.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.