Nothing is ever certain.

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, ‘Some animals are more equal than others’—that he embedded in our language and...

Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.

For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Just keep your nose clean and everything will be jake.

It’s strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.