Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.

A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.