“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

“What a lark! What a plunge!”

“How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.”

“In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.”

“The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.”

“For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?”

“Fair ladies, masked, are roses in their bud;Dismasked, the damask sweet commixture shown,Are angels vailing clouds, or roses blown.”

“Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.”

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

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”

“If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.”

“I say, without characters, fame lives long.”

“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,Live regist'red upon our brazen tombsAnd then grace us in the disgrace of death;When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,Th' endeavor of this present breath may buyThat honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edgeAnd make us heirs of all eternity.”

“He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause.”

“O, the difference of man and man!To thee a woman's services are due.”

“Women being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the walls.”

“Man is the will, and woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail.”

“The breach of customIs breach of all.”

“Liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum.”

“What is the city but the people?”