O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one’s life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, “Good God! Here I am again!” not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.
Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing – nothing. Only perhaps if it’s the book of a young person – or of a friend – no, even so, I think myself infallible.
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, ‘the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction’ when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren’t for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?
The poet is always our contemporary.
I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Theories then are dangerous things.