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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to...

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.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say “yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one…Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn’t dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn’t so much...

… I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms around you, then place both arms round you and share with you, the above now seems sweeter to me than words...

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous – no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas...

You are quite fortunate, it is quite a wonderful opportunity, the possession of leisure.

There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.

Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.

Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around...

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.

Too late… everything’s always too late.

… and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, ‘Sir, was you calling out for me? … Sir, I know … I know,’ and touched him.

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But the horses didn’t want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn’t want it,...

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants – the whole system’s wrong, and she must challenge it.