The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.