The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

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 begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity -- their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.

There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?