Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.
We have really no absent friends.
Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.
Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.
There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.
One’s sentiments – call them that – one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.
To the sun Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden – to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry.
There’s something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk.
Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world – a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
Dogs are a habit, I think.