[ On experiencing his initial stroke :] So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!

The war has used up words.

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

The fatal futility of Fact.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art . . . what we are talking about—& the only way to know it is to have lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions & possibilities I didn’t embrace .

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation .

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried—that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were.

In art economy is always beauty.

Vereker’s secret, my dear man—the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.