By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.