The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.

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.

A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.

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

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.

traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.