Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.

I am rooted, but I flow.