A writer wastes nothing.

Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it ... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school.

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.