If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

... 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.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do.

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.