“Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.”

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.

The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.

Her love was like lavender, Delicate and melancholy.

I’m still trying to fix up the wreckage you left behind, the chaotic strings of misery you let fall to the floor. Each piece delicately piercing my skin, the red glow a contrast to my continual white limbs.

She’s a delicate masterpiece. Touching her involves the risk of breaking her pieces.

I know how our fingers would interlace. Like this and that. Delicate yet determined. As porcelain scales in serene movements. Iridescent in ways our thoughts could not convey. How beautifully we are made in the ways we trace out along soft skins the words that linger within us.

Fall in love fast, make sure I handle it delicate.

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

Young girls are told you have to be the delicate princess. Hermione taught them that you can be the warrior.