A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.