To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.