Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.