While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.

There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.