A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.
I have always suffered from the feeling that it’s better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I’ve done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. But this book I’m worrying about now really deserves to be written, I think, for it has a message of its own.
As far as I can see, a man who’s fond of books never need starve!
Oh, sir, I’m glad you got home in time for Christmas,” she said. “The children were counting on it. Did you have a successful trip, sir?” “Every trip is successful when you get home again,” said Gissing.
Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already.
For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.
He was so busy that he did not even have time to think of his pipe, or the morning paper. At last, just before lunch, he found a breathing space. He sat down in the study to rest his legs, and looked for the Times. It was not in its usual place on his reading table. At that moment the puppies woke up, and he ran out to attend them. He would have been distressed if he had known that Fuji had the paper in the kitchen, and was studying the HELP WANTED columns.
People need books, but they don’t know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. – Roger Mifflin.
Those who have bound themselves are only too eager to see the chains on others.
Talkers never write. They go on talking.” There.
Very often human beings don’t become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.
Wars are won in the mind before they can be won on the field.
Gissing lived alone.
The level sun, warily peering over the edge like a cautious marksman, fired golden volleys unerringly at him. At once Gissing was aware and watchful. Brief truce was over: the hopeless war with Time began anew.
A girl of 19 doesn’t react towards things. She explodes.
He was a little weary of this just, charitable, consoling, hebdomadal God; this God who might be sufficiently honoured by a decorously memorized ritual. Yet was he too shallow?
Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.
Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalatable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art-and chiefly in written art- means to halt that ceaseless, cruel drift.
But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.
To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods.