Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop: there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end.

Sometimes life makes you older than your age.

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.

I talk with the authority of failure.

Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn't always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions?