1. ”A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
2. ”Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”
3. “Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.”
4. “Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.”
5. ”Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.”
6. “He carried her to the window, so that she too, saw the view. They sank upon their knees, invisible from the road, they hoped, and began to whisper one another's names. Ah ! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt. Then they spoke of other things - the desultory talk of those who have been fighting to reach one another, and whose reward is to rest quietly in each other's arms.”
7. “In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. he lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.”
8. "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
9. "It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead."
10. “It isn't possible to love and part... You can transmutate love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
11. "It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom."
12. “Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?"”
13. “Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
14. "Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work." ~
15. “Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.”
16. "Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored."
17. "Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."
18. "Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour."
19. "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
20. "Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses."
21. "Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership."
22. "Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it."
23. "Railway termini ... are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return."
24. "Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better."
25. “She knew this type very well--the vague aspirations, the mental disorder, the familiarity with the outside of books…
26. “Sometimes a plot triumphs too completely. The characters have to suspend their natures at every turn, or else are so swept away by the course of Fate that our sense of their reality is weakened. ... Hardy arranges events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. ... In other words the characters have been required to contribute too much to the plot. ... Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. ... Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the dnouement. ... logic takes over the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude. Death and marriage are almost his only connection between his characters and his plot. ... [T]he writer, poor fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to get like anyone else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering and screwing. This - as far as one can generalize - is the inherent defect of novels: they go off at the end; and there are two explanations of it: firstly, failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing: the characters have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted commas. But the characters are gone or dead.”
27. "Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
28. "The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express."
29. "The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define."
30. "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves."
31. "The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal."
32. "The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again."
33. "There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light ... We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow follows us. Choose a place where you won't do harm--yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."
34. "There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover's arm she felt that she was having her share."
35. "Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think is creation's."
36. “This element of surprise or mystery - the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called - is of great importance in a plot. It occurs through a suspension of the time-sequence; a mystery is a pocket in time, and it occurs crudely, as in "Why did the queen die?" and more subtly in half-explained gestures and words, the true meaning of which only dawns pages ahead. Mystery is essential to plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. ... To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.”
37. ”To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.”
38. "Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither."
39. “We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.”
40. “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
41. ”What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
42. “Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do belive in Art for Art's sake.”
