It is your own fault if people don’t care for you; you don’t care for them. That you should be indifferent to their good opinion is all very well; but you don’t care for their indifference.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection.

The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated.

The note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.

Experience is...a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window.

If you have been hated, you have also been loved.

He looked at a pretty girl as he would have listened to a piece of music.

She had always been fond of history, and in Rome was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.