Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.