Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

Life's bare as a bone.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.