We come up against beauty here — for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place lat...
I have no profession. It is another example of my decadence. My attitude - quite an indefensible one - is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to b...
If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.
I love folklore and all festering superstitions.
He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.
He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much a...
I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and a...
Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist. Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A d...
I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is.And what is it? asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.The old trouble; things won't fit.What things?The things of the universe...
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeat...
-while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.
Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, a...
The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellec...
Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prat...
The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: Do not be proud of your...
Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.