Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world

The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.