“As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.”

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature.

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.

Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.

I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a sling shot.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

It’s so easy to get carried away with things valued on the hereafter.

It just seems to me that it’s hypocritical for us as a culture to say, “Bullying is a terrible thing,” when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

I take our youngsters with us because I don’t know anything that teaches them so much.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,