Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
War is not women’s history.
To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
I got out this diary and read, as one always reads one’s own writing; with a kind of guilty intensity.
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.
We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
A light here required a shadow there.
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; my thoughts follow the exact same process.
After that, how unbelievable death was! – that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
Only longing can fill with more of itself.
How can I express the darkness?
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.