England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
I do not believe in Belief.
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
Life – No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
Lord I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting – both for us and for her.
We move between two darknesses.
Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world’s enemy, and she must stifle it.
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.
Man can learn everything if he will but try.
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
Do you suppose there’s any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.