Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.
For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.
The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.
You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.
Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
How remorseless life is!
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.
To love makes one solitary.
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.