Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
I think patriotism is like charity – it begins at home.
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.