“It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.”

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

We live as we dream – alone.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget.

If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .