It is equally vain,” she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.