I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

Tragedies come in the hungry hours.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions──a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard──can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.