Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.