The joys of motherhood are not excessively apparent during the first few weeks of a baby’s life.
However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.
Babies are a nuisance, of course. But so does everything seem to be that is worthwhile – husbands and books and committees and being loved and everything. We have to choose between ease and rich unrest.
College is a secluded life of scholastic vegetation.
Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.
If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.
It is probably true to say that the largest scope for change still lies in men’s attitude to women, and in women’s attitude to themselves.
Venice is all sea and sculpture...
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?
I can think of few important movements for reform in which success was won by any method other than that of an energetic minority presenting the indifferent majority with a fait accompli, which was then accepted.
The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.
There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation.
It seems delightfully incongruous,’ he wrote from Armentie‘res, ’that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour’s walk from the trenches.
He was, I told myself, a unique experience in my existence; I never think definitely of him as man or boy, as older or younger, taller or shorter than I am, but always of him as a mind in tune with mine, in which many of the notes are quite different from mine but are all in the same key.
I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.
When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.
A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.
But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man’s inventions have eliminated so much distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else.