I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.

Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.

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.