... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.

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

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.

The delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended.