"The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."

"Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy."

"Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled."

"Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along."

"I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper."

"I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants."

"I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult."

"He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice's loneliness: it increased."

"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."

"Too late... everything's always too late."

"Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness and hypocrisy."

"The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink."

"It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools."

"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch."

"Nothing ever happens to me, " she reflected..... An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more."

"The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance."

"No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end."

"The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested."

"A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned."

"Human beings have their great chance in the novel."

"So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism."

"Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration."

"There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer."

"One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life."

"I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual."

"For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours."

"There's never any great risk as long as you have money."

"London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!"

"A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air..."

"The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself."

"We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next."

"While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven."

"Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism."

"There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours."

"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."

"In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream."

"She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters - the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go."

"She was as bored as her brother would have been, and had not his gift of listening beneath words."

"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."

"The historian records, but the novelist creates."

"In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art."

"Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love."

"Nonsense and beauty have close connections."

"Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness."

"Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind."

"Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards."

"But they did not chatter much, for the boy, when he liked a person, would as soon sit silent in his company as speak."

"Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it."

"Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time."

"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions."