I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Life's bare as a bone.

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.