The historian records, but the novelist creates.

All a child’s life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes – morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, “This is all very well, you’re clever, we know—but come!” It...

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved....

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology...

You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men....

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she misled her aunt. He mistook her fertility for weakness. He supposed her “as clever as they make...

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it...

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when...

now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.

We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.

So never give in,” continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that...

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

There is only a certain amount of kindness in the world…just as there is a certain amount of light. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from...

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art...

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and...

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.

Why children?’ he asked. ‘Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies!...

Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman’s tenderness.

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not...

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own...

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment...

It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward . . . He hadn’t a God or a lover–the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease,...

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

I’m afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

Most of us are pseudo-scholars…for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as...

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement … It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss,...

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on...

The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see, dear; it’s...

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

We move between two darknesses.

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...