It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

The essence of taste is suitability. Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony and order.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them." Mark Twain "...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.