As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

literature is the record of our discontent.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.