Others

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

L’art est un anti-destin.

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.

There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

The holiest of all holidays are those

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

The best fame is a writer’s fame: it’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.

A beginning, a muddle, and an end.

When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed,

[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Books think for me.

Your borrowers of books —those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.