When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

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

There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.