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(...) Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jor...more

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It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical...more

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

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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

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Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?

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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

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Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?

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And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women d...more

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.

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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

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...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

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Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigor...more