Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all -- save ''a man with a red moustache,'' ''a young man in gray smoking a pipe.''

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.