literature is the record of our discontent.

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

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

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