"Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; to love her is a liberal education."

"We were in some little time fixed in our seats, and sat with that dislike which people not too good-natured usually conceive of each other at first sight."

"If there is a verity in wine, according to the old adage, what an amiable-natured character Dick's must have been! In proportion as he took in wine he overflowed with kindness."

"a Yea might turn in to a Nae and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied. In other talk you argument out until you get the answer you want."

"Though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment."

"I think women should make a habit of canceling the wars."

"There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind."

"I'm still very drawn to British women writers, especially Iris Murdoch and her impossible esoteric characters and the philosophical questions that they ask."

"I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore."

"The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind."

"All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack."

"The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values."

"Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)"

"We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."

"I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped."

"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."

"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."

"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."

"Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy."

"To eat, teeth must meet."

"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."

"The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge."

"Almost anything that consoles us is a fake."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."

"Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out."

"The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe."

"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."

"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self."

"Only lies and evil come from letting people off."

"There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us."

"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality."

"He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life."

"The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself."

"We can only learn to love by loving."

"If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over."

"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."

"The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists."

"These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world."

"Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty . . . unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision. No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm."

"No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried."