Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let the villans be soundly killed at the end of the book. I think it is possible that by confining your child to the blameless stories of life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.

But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.

Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.