Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.