We talked about constellations-the usual thing, when two people haven't yet discovered which one knows less about the stars than the other; the rest is romantic fantasy, which I can't bear.

In Florence I rebelled and told her that frankly I thought her Fra Angelico rather mawkish. Then I corrected myself and said "naive." She didn't deny it, on the contrary, she was delighted; it...

Boys!" she said. "You can't imagine what they're like-they think you're their mother, and that's frightful!

Why should I be melancholy? England wasn't in sight yet.

Sooner or later, every person invents a story he considers to be his life, {...} or a whole series of stories {...}.

I have been serving up stories to some sort of public, and in these stories I have, I know, laid myself bare - to the point of non-recognition. I live, not with my own story, but just with those parts...

Children are something we want or don't want.

How many children are really wanted? The fact that the woman would rather have it once it's there is a different matter, an automatic reaction of the instincts, she forgets she tried to avoid it and...

My work?" she said. "You can see for yourself, patching up fragments. That is supposed to have been a vase. From Crete. I stick the past together.

My life was in her hands .

the Indians were far too gentle, too peaceable, positively childlike. They squatted for whole evenings in their white straw hats on the earth, motionless as toadstools, content without light, silent....

Ivy was a model, she chose her clothes to match the color of the car, I think, and the color of the car to match her lipstick or the other way around, I'm not sure which it was.

The ladies' mauve-dyed hair interspersed with the bald patches of the gentlemen, who had taken off their panama hats-they must have broken out of an old-age home, I thought, but I didn't say it.

They were obviously Americans, I could hear their voices as the party wandered around our tomb; to judge by the voices, they might have been stenographers from Cleveland. Oh, isn't it lovely? Oh, is...

She was seriously disappointed, a child I was treating like a woman, or a woman I was treating like a child, I didn't know myself which it was.

How many of the people I meet are interested in whether I'm enjoying myself, in my feelings at all?

on the one hand she had boundless trust in me, merely because I was thirty years older, a childish trust, and on the other hand no respect at all. I was vexed to find I expected respect.

a woman with time on her hands in the morning, a woman who wanders about before she is dressed, for example, rearranging flowers in a vase and talking about love and marriage, is something no man can...