“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

“What a lark! What a plunge!”

“How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.”

“In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.”

“The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.”

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words, Remembers me of his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form”

“Remember thee!Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seatIn this distracted globe.”

“My rage is gone,And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.Help, three o' th' chiefest soldiers; I'll be one.Beat thou the drum, that it speaks mournfully,Trail your steel spikes. Though in this city heHath widowed and unchilded many a one,Which to this hour bewail the injury,Yet he shall have a noble memory.Assist.”

“I have supped full with horrors.”

“Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time.”

“To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters.”

“Love sees with the heart and not with mind.”

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

“Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought.”

“Bounty, being free itself, thinks all others so.”

“He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, him not know t, and he's not robbed at all.”

“'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, When not to be, receives reproach of being, And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed, Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing.”

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth.”

“The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,Our arms are waving, our lips are apart.”

“Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).”

“Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try.”

“Time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.”

“The time is out of joint.”