You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

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

No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.

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.

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

Most men have a deadness in them that frightens me so because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St.Mawr, and then think? Why can't they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do?