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"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
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"The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal."
Society

"Ideas are fatal to caste."
Creativity

"No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour."
Man

"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand."
Politics

"The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death."
Love

"Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety."
Religion

"England has always been disinclined to accept human nature."
Nature

"At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity."
Books

"People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness."
Death

"Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient."
Communication
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development

"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
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Personal Development

"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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Personal Development

"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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Personal Development

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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Personal Development

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development

"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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Personal Development

"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
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Personal Development

"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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Personal Development
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