“For romantic young people like he is, the world always looks best at a distance; and a prison where one's allowed to order one's own dinner is not at all bad.”

“A young woman, if she fall into bad gands, may be teazed, and kept at a distance from those she wants to be with; but one cannot comprehend a young man's being under such restraint, as not to be able to spend a week with his father, if he likes it.”

“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.”

“Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been like that.”

“I always like the bad ones. I know he's a bad one of some sort.”

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”