I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.

That complete statement which is literature.

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

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.