The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.