“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.

Finally he closed the distance between us and kissed me – a sweet, gentle kiss that held within it every single one of the thousand days I’d loved him as my everything, long after I’d begun to love him as a friend.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

When dawn comes, that memory gradually distances…Tonight, I will bring it to sleep with me, so that will not be taken away by the waves of the night.

The distance between who I am, and who I want to be is measure only, by my actions.

Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want.

Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion.

whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.