I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
Life - No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.
They had nothing in common but the English language.
History develops, art stands still.
When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
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