About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.

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?

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.