It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.