"And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it."

"The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind."

"Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams."

"The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more."

"She, who was bored almost to agony, and who had nothing at all to do, she had not time to think even, seriously, of anything. Time being, after all, only the current of the soul in its flow."

"The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done."

"Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one's own life."

"We fucked a flame into being."

"Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."

"And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the resumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst."

"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates."

"Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told."

"God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything."

"So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness."

"Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today."

"You have striven so hard and so long to compel life. Can't you now slowly change and let life slowly drift into you ... let the invisible life steal into you and slowly possess you."

"It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air."