“When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.”

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.

You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.

Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.