“Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

One can say everything best over a meal.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

Character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

I admire Peter Mandleson’s chutzpah and the way he transformed the Labour party but not his dubious ideas about Europe and industrial policy.

And, in the future, while the dumb show of bohemianism plays itself out in the cookie cutter shape of the politically correct martyr/victim, aesthetic terrorists will not involve themselves in the dubious rewards of celebrity.

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.