Mr. Pembroke, watching his broad back, desired to bury a knife in it. The desire passed, partly because it was unclerical, partly because he had no knife, and partly because he soon blurred over what...

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may...

He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.

Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her...

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even...

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

I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.” Liking her better, he smiled and said, “It’ll get us to heaven.” “Will it?” “If heaven existed.” “Do you not believe...

And she began the oft-told tale of a lady of imperial descent who could find no husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate, and had lived on unwed, her age...

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.Originally...

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity–not the decorous religion...

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

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

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

There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some...

They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to...

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that...

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.

One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That’s where we practical fellows’- he smiled-‘are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and...

The doctrine of laisser-faire will not work in the material world.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and...

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

As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around...

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who...

Ansell.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.

Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes...

Oh, poor, poor fellow!’ said Mrs. Elliot with a remorse that was sincere, though her congratulations would not have been.

… And now we shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.

Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face…. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of...

Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

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

Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.

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...

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm...