"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

"She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!"

"Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today."

"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition."

"In the ancient recipe the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep drink and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up from drink you become sober and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade."

"It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul."

"Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges."

"Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?"

"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."

"The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up."

"Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex."

"They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her."

"The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack."

"I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves."

"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."

"The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens."

"The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else."

"Men don't think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted."

"Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks."

"All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day."

"Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering."

"It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it."

"Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. Ibelieve especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with awarm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the womentake it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all thiscold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy."

"Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."

"Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man."

"The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines."

"Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror."

"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."

"Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman."

"From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence."

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

"There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him."

"A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification."

"The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea."

"The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread."

"God is only a great imaginative experience."

"In every living thing there is the desire for love."

"Only youth has a taste of immortality."

"A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it."

"I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy."

"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."

"Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard."

"So, after three days of incessant brandy-drinking, he had burned out the youth from his blood, he had achieved this kindled state of oneness with all the world, which is the end of youth's most passionate desire."

"You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it."

"Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may."

"Be as promiscuous as the rabbits!' said Hammond. 'Why not? What's wrong with rabbits? Are they any worse than a neurotic, revolutionary humanity, full of nervous hate?"

"It is our business to go as we are impelled."

"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."

"What you intuitively desire that is possible to you."