To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.
Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
And as her love revived, so did her capacity for suffering. Life, more important, grew more bitter.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
We move between two darknesses.
The world is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it...
Only connect!
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
He was thinking of the irony of friendship—so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream.
George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue...
But this time I'm not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground a...
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction all...
Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating....