Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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.

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

Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!