For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.
I shall be a clinger to the outsides of worlds all my life.
We were full of experiments and reforms, we were going to do without table napkins. Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.
It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the lava flow of sentence into sentence that I need.
There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is ripling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.
All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence – dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones.
The soul must brave itself to endure.
Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction – so we are told.
The common fund of experience is very deep.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.
For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the common ruts, however muddy.
To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.
Buy for me from the King’s own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For,” he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, “I have done with men.
Shakespeare’s state of mind.
Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.
Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.
They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing.