A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
We do not judge great art. It judges us.
As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next.
... passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions -- a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.
A first book often has enough material in it for half a dozen.
It was strange how you could never form any conclusion from what women said. It was not that they did not know what they were talking about, but you never drew the right conclusions.
