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

What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say,of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

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.