A living dog’s better than a dead lion.
Looking back at a repetition of empty days, one sees that monuments have sprung up. Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie: when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.
What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.
Some people are molded by their admirations, others by their hostilities.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.
My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
A romantic man often feels more uplifted with two women than with one: his love seems to hit the ideal mark somewhere between two different faces.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.
Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake – much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.
Solitary and farouche people don’t have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.
The novelist’s – any writer’s – object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.