I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.