As nobody can possibly tell me whether one’s writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one’s own pleasure. I am sure of that.
The way to write well is to live intensely.
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.
To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.
A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.
Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.
How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.
Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.
There’ll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.
Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.
Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.
The world is crammed with delightful things.