A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.