Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.