It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart.

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.

Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn't work too well.

She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.