The artist usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and...

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.

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...

And yet – and yet – one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad...

It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great...

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the...

It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you...

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

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,...

Aren’t I enough for you?’ she asked.’No,’ he said. ‘You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal...

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional...

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him…There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

I WANT her though, to take the same from me.She touches me as if I were herself, her own.She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, thatI am the other,she thinks we are all of...

Life is ours to be spent, not tobe saved.

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

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

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.

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity...

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again,we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will...

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual...

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....

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life!

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,...

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

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.

Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you...

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse...