The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.
I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
MGM bores me when I see them, but I don’t see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.
I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don’t want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them.
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.