When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.