Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.