Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

How remorseless life is!