“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.”

“Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.”

“The weary sun hath made a golden setAnd by the bright tract of his fiery carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.”

“Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.”

“Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

“For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?”

“Look, what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds in yonder east! Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tip-toe on the misty mountain-tops.”

“Yon grey linesThat fret the clouds are messengers of day.”

“Full many a glorious morn I have seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.”

“Behold the Sea,The opaline, the plentiful and strong,Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,Purger of earth, and medicine of men;Creating a sweet climate by my breath,Washing out harms and griefs from memory,And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,Giving a hint of that which changes not.”

“The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?”

“Behold the threaden sails,Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea,Breasting the lofty surge”

“The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us.”

“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o-erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.”

“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.”