I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated...

Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.

Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed...

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy–even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of...

At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.

I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men – at least they can cry.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn’t have any.

Have all beautiful things sad destinies?

As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. ‘If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ‘ I said, ‘your soul...

And I’ll look back at him because I shan’t be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid...

The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. Like when they say, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.

And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I’d been afraid for a long time, I’d been afraid for a long time. There’s fear, of...

When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don’t know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky....

When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and...

She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear...

As for her, I’d forgotten her for the moment. So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and...

I want more of this feeling – fire and wings.

It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to...

It’s funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl’s clothes cost more than the girl inside them?

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset…Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses…When they had finished, there would be...

Justice. I’ve heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials

Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won’t deform my feet (it’s not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with...

And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?

When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose...

Everything tender and melancholy – as life is sometimes, just for one moment.

No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us…a difficult moment when you are out of practice – a moment that makes you go cold, cold and wary.

But in the daytime it was all right. And when you’d had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don’t know how people...

The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?

Anything you like; anything I like… No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us

You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past – or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this...

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only – to be left alone.

One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and one that is broken, sad as a woman who is growing old.

Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand….How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss….

Do you think that too,” she said, “that I have slept too long in the moonlight?

Stephan was secretive and a liar, but he was a very gentle and expert lover. She was the petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess. She was all these things to Stephan...

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

And then the days came when I was alone.