“If you call a spade a diamond some people will think you are frivolous and affected, but other people will understand how much blacker things may be said about spades by the simple trick of pretending that they are diamonds.”

She treats symbol and artifice as a way to speak more darkly, not less honestly · Essay, Symbols in Literature, Collected Prose

• Language
• Symbolism
• Truth

“I am very well and happy — each time, as for instance yesterday, that I see the turmoil and soot of London, I rejoice to be living in the country. I am a perfect fool for love of it.”

Written months before her death, after she had settled to work in the English countryside · Letter from Henley-on-Thames, 25 September 1928, quoted by William Rose Benét

• Happiness
• Home
• Nature

“Don't let this kill you. I have run away.”

The brief note left when she fled her first marriage for Horace Wylie · Letter to her mother, December 1910

• Family
• Freedom
• Rebellion