For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.