A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.

We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.

What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.