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.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.

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

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.