Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life – froze it.
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
No, I’m not clever. I’ve always cared more for people than for ideas.
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.
To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
But then anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness – I am nothing.