Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

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

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.