idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.