Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

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

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.