People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.