What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.

By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.