Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

When man has nothing but his will to assert--even his good-will--it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.