Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.
That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!
War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
To be loved to madness – such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
War makes rattling good history.
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
But no one came. Because no one ever does.
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.
Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.