I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.

I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.