For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, - too much money, and too few ideas.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.