But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.