Everybody who does anything at all does too much.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

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

Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her-of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated-he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch.

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.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!