But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen.... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.