I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge