Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

It's hard to ravish a tin of sardines.

To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.

They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.

Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed.... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.