He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

But I like the feel of men on things, while they're alive. There's a feel of men about trucks, because they've been handled with men's hands, all of them.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.