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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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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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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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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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I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to w...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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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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She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, wi...more

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Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.

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Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dis...more

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She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, ...more

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She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her t...more