I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

War is not women's history.

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.