Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

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

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.