“Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!”

“Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.”

“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day”

“Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

“I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the shadow enter? [. . .] I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.”

“It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

“Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall.”