The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

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

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.