It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.