A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre