Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

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.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

... 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.