Words without experience are meaningless.

Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.