And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.
He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed – a kind of amiable absurdity.
There’s truth as far as you knows it; and there’s truth as far as you’re asked for it. But they don’t represent the whole truth – not necessarily.
What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: “You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls”; if the answer is, “But I don’t,” there is no more to be said.
We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are ‘called’ and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.
The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.
The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.
Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.
Nothing is more cruel to the young than to tell them that the world is made for youth.
It is ridiculous to take on a man’s job just in order to be able to say that ‘a woman has done it – yah!’ The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.
There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.
The first thing a principle does is kill somebody.
What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.
One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.
Advertising never sold a bad product twice.
I often think when a man’s once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.
The artist’s knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.