"A heart does not suit me. Somehow, it doesn’t go with modern dress."

"We meditate over the things our fathers looked upon as delightfully intriguing with a sigh of regret, a sigh for that “lovely toy, so fiercely sought,” which lost its charm by being caught."

"She, who was normally of a humility proper to her circumstances, had always shocked him profoundly by her monstrous conceit, her overbearing wilfulness, her amazing self-confidence on this question of her own talent."

"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge and the rest is construction."

"Life is a dream, and it is well that it is so, or who could survive some of its experiences?"

"During her authorship the scantly scribbled pages accumulated like white leaves, left to drift over her studio floor. Then, as in all the frequent crisis in her life, her friends rallied around her with scenes, jealousies, memories, quarrels, recriminations, good cases of wine, fine conversation, threats of farewell, new leases of affection–all the dramatics of loyalty, disillusion, hero worship, duty, fatigue, patience, and devotion which animated even her Platonic associations–all the humorous and painful disorders which genius, as if to prove its exceptional chemistry, catalyzes in commoner lives."

"She is one of those shapely little women with the will of a giant. Psychologists would cite her as an example of their compensation theory–a case where expansion of the volition makes up for the limits of the flesh, a hypothesis which in small men, and granted the eighteenth century, can make Napoleons."

"I act with paintings the way I act with things…I make a window the way I look through a window. If the open window isn’t any good in my picture, I paint a curtain and close the window the way I would in a room."

"Apparently men’s minds are of two sorts–those which attract interest and those which supply it. Those whose minds attract are the special few: the painters, writers, poets, philosophers, thinkers, messiahs, potters, jewel-setters, glass blowers, missal illuminators, or artists and artisans in general. Those who supply interest in these special few are the unspecial millions. The fragile pieces of paper or canvas or the easily effaceable records of passion, utopias, belief, human hope, godhead, or the portrait of the beloved–all these delicate documentations which the special few leave behind, the unspecial millions father and save in the memory, museums, universities, libraries, civilizations, or dresser drawers."