Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?