My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

When the wolf walks by you, you will remember.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A leering, sneering obscene little harpy.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must
be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she
him.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.).

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps -- who knows? -- we might talk by the way.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.

I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.