... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

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.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.