Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

literature is the record of our discontent.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.