Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.