To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.