“So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.”

“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion”

“She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately—with a more premediated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish—to clutch at one’s heart.”

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”

“The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.”

“The oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd.”

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”