God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

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.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.