I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

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

Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.