[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?