I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be..

When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together wit….

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis..

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but….

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness..

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the….

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and….

I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnif….

I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius..

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis..

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint..

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn..

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel….

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down u….

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong c….

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings..

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things..

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother..

I want to live quietly..

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius..

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggesti….