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

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Habit is not mere subjugation, it is a tender tie; when one remembers habit it seems to have been happiness.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.