I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday -- nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time -- his death and her sorrow -- I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together -- I heard them together.

If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.