The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.