The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.