The suitable is the last thing we ever want.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.