“There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.”

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

The building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

Beginnings are always messy.

Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious – there was generally some reason for it.

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

He might wish and wish and never get it – the beauty and the loving in the world!

We have known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls.

Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.

We are not living in a private world of our own.

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing – deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.

Such was not quite the condition of Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy’s soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte’s body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

When you get over 95, every day is your day.

Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was – it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.

She writes an article which becomes an article she writes in different ways over and over and over again: Women need to organize. They need to create their own bosses. They need to have support networks and gangs so that they are a force.

I was lucky, you know, I always had a beautiful girl and the money was good. Although I would have done the whole thing over for, oh, perhaps half.

You have to hope that [good things] happen to you. […] That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in.

They can’t chain my spirit! My spirit runs free! Walls can’t contain it! Laws can’t restrain it! Authority has no power over it!

From an evolutionary standpoint you can’t just wipe everything out and start over, and I don’t think you can do it in the school system either.