Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life - while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.