Quotes

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

"Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear."

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.

Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way.

The skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

The truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

I would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.