The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

The world of the egotist is, inevitably, a narrow world, and the boundaries of self are limited to the close horizon of personality.... But, within this horizon, there is room for many attributes that are excellent.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Borrowed illusions are better than none.