Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress of evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part...
DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. L...
There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the dar...
Lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their sol...
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
The credulity of crowds is never-ending.
The best years are when you know what you're doing.
So we may use our books to form a barricade against the world,interweaving their words with our own to ward off the heat of the day.
Ah,’ Arthur cried out, ‘I have never known one month of repose since I took up the crown. I have lost the key to contentment.
My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or d...
Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. And Derrick must be his...
Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money.
Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sp...
London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Inf...
In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ‘queen Katherine is the true queen of England
He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which...
When the city was described as pagan, it was partly because no one living among such urban suffering could have much faith in a god who allowed cities such as London to flourish.
Suffering is intrinsic to human existence. There is no joy without its attendant pain.
So do we discover, in the world, that our worst fears are unfulfilled; yet we must fear, in order that we may feel delight.
I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a...