Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.
No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
They had nothing in common but the English language.
The historian records, but the novelist creates.
It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die – neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea.
You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.
Life is like a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the intrument as you go along.
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.