To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.