There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.