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.
When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
Bless thy simplicity, Tess.
You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.