He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.