The map appears to us more real than the land.

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.

It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.