An intelligent man or woman willing to make a career of reviewing fiction is hard to come by ... And the temporaries do the work cheaply. Moreover, continuity may be got at the expense of intellectual arthritis; a reviewer who has been at his grisly task for half a lifetime may stiffen into prejudices of every sort, and become too anchylosed to do better than turn his back to a new wave when it rushes down on him.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

... we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.