Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.

I press to my centre, and find there is something there.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.