All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.