1. “A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”
2. “Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.”
3. “Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats - all human life is there.”
4. ”Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”
5. ”Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.”
6. “Ideas are, in truth, force.”
7. “If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.”
8. “I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”
9. “I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel - the merit upon which all its other merits ... hopelessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, and his delight.”
10. “In art economy is always beauty.”
11. “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
12. “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.”
13. “I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.”
14. “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?”
15. “Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!”
16. “One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.”
17. “People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.”
18. “She had an unequalled gift . . . of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”
19. “Show, don't tell.”
20. “The fatal futility of Fact.”
21. “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million - a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass, which forms again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.”
22. “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”
23. "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt torepresent life."
24. “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
25. “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
26. “To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life's underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure. Towards these ends I pledge my life's work. I will supply the children with tools and knowledge to overcome the obstacles. I will pass on the wisdom of my years and temper it with patience. I shall impact in each child the desire to fulfill his or her dream. I shall teach.”
27. “To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.”
28. “Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.”
29. “We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.”
30. “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. 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."
31. “We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
32. “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”
