"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"

"The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."

"Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?"

"The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general."

"It will be all over this day week - comfort - discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling."

"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

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