Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

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.

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.