"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life."

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"They can because they think they can."

"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."

"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them."

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness."

"It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work."

"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly."

"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."

"You send a boy to school in order to make friends of the right sort."

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."

"It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer."

"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order."

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."

"I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose."

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?"

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe."

"Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame."

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity."

"To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves."

"The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind."

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

"That great Cathedral space which was childhood."

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works."

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

"Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more."

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world."

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."

"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art."

"If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged"

"Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials."

"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."

"If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think"

"For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together"

"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the"

"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that"