As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate.

How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed-up, become part of another.

Her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man