Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.
Life’s bare as a bone.
You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.
If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
Life would split apart without letters.
To sit and contemplate – to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.
Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.