If there's anything more mortifying than being famous at 14, it's being washed up right after.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. "Have you thought of a story?" I was asked every morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative

Have a good day, darlin' girl. Be kind, be brave, and remember who loves you! -Golden (the mortifying things I now have to say to my sister)

Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.

If there's anything more mortifying than being famous at 14 it's being washed up right after.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty how many ghastly mortifying missteps how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment how partial all accomplishment is how incomplete?