I get a warm feeling among my books.
Books do furnish a room.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
The latter's boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.
His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.
An exceedingly well-informed report,' said the General. 'You have given yourself the trouble to go into matters thoroughly, I see. That is one of the secrets of success in life.
Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.
Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they'll marry anybody.
My brother is a strange fellow," said Bernard, speaking with terrible bonhomie.
Well,' said Mrs. Erdleigh, speaking kindly, as if to a child who has proposed a game inevitably associated with the breakage of china, 'I know trouble will come of it if we do.
Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.
Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.
A woman’s power of imitation and adaptation make her capable of confronting you with your own arguments after even the briefest acquaintance: how much more so if a state of intimacy exists.
Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured.
Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.
In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.
Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink.
I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all undertakings of life;but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough.
But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.
I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.
