He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very… - Henry James

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous-or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you’re in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all – whey then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.

Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.