Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
I’m not much interested in travelling scholarships for women – or in fact in scholarships, tout court! – they’d much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids...
She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
I’m afraid I’m an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.
I have drunk of the wine of life at last, I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through, never to grow quite cold again till the end.
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.
There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook’s intervening.
The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring.
The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.
It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.
To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.