A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Reality is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?

It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.

Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.

It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.