“I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.”

“People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.”

“I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.”

“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.”

“It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines”

“I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting…”

“One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.”

“And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don't like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and”

“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.”

“From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.”

“Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave.”