What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

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.

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

If you think with enough energy about a hoped-for event, it will in the end happen. Not because you willed it. Because it was all the time in your nature.

I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him -- to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.