“Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth...!”

“ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.”

“How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.”

“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.”

“You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.”

“Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life intoare awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowingfor long years.And for this reason, some old things are lovelywarm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.”

“because when i feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then i feel the colonies aren't far enough. the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavory among all the stars: made foul by men. Then i feel i've swallowed gall, and its eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough to get away. but when i get a turn, i forget it all again. though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can't, an' nobody can, i'd better hold my peace, an' try an' life my own life: if i've got one to live, which i rather doubt.”