I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.
Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?
For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.
Few of humanity's characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to be.
So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.
If the would-be writer studies people in their everyday lives and discovers how to make his characters in their quieter moods interesting to his readers, he will have learned far more than he can ever learn from the constant presentation of crises.
However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.
The idea that it is necessary to go to a university in order to become a successful writer . . . is one of those fantasies that surround authorship.
Venice is all sea and sculpture.
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