"By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a prescence, a genius loci, a potency."

"I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre."

"Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill."

"The gods love salt. The sweat of human endeavour adds savour to every sacrifice."

"Nothing that the law-makers or the law-breakers or the MCC or the Board of Control or any conferences or county committees or pressmen or captains or players can do to it or have done to it over the years - nothing can affect cricket's basic worth or irresistible attraction."

""Sir!" she checked him. "I think you are talking treason." "I hope I am not obscure," said he."

"Mr Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong—a condition much more common than is generally supposed."

"It was heroic!" "Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius."

"They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!"

"When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion—the noblest religion any man could have to guide him."

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

"Bestir, ladies! To your chaise, and see that you contrive to look your best. Soon the eyes of Guichen will be upon you, and the condition of your interior to-morrow will depend upon the impression made by your exterior to-day."

"You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities — God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them."

"His face was a frame of strong brutal bones, so hard, the set of his jaw so aggressive, that it brought to mind Teuton warriors, shouts, winging of axes, berserk."

"Things never turn out in cricket as one expects."

"Never did any man more enjoy work for its own sake. Reed would have written for no reward whatever; the demand for the product of his pen was more exciting than payment for it."

"And one's passions are so random and unreliable - cricket scores one minute, Swinburne the next."

"What I really hate about cricket is, it's such a damned good game."

"I wasted my youth on Wisden."

"It is possible, in the interests of a false religion (such as Nationalism or Fascism) to avert one's eyes from the plain fact of human brotherhood; but the fact stubbornly remains, and we ignore it at our peril. We are all in the same boat, and we live in the shadow of a common doom."

"My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of charity how oddly scant you are! How Lang O Lord, how full of Cantuar!"

"Poetry . . . has nothing to do with facts, though everything to do with truth."

"Patient, dramatic, serious, genial, From over to over the game goes on, Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial, Civilisation under the sun."

"he was undoing the wooden box, and he took out the silver sword. "This is the best of my treasures," he said. "It will bring me luck. And it will bring you luck, because you gave it to me. I don't tell anybody my name - it is not safe. But because you gave me the sword and I didn't borrow it, I will tell you." He whispered. "It is Jan.""

"Bittersweet creatures : So what is art, that it can enhance social abilities and transform the self? First of all, art is something that lasts and can spread to others. So although one can imagine a lover whispering an improvised poem into her lover’s ear, for the most part a poem will travel in time and space, and last beyond the moment of its conception."

"People often think that a fiction is something untrue, but this is wrong. The word derives from the Latin fingere, to make. As something made, fiction is different from something discovered, as in physics, or from something that happened, as in the news. But this does not mean it is false. Fiction is about possible selves in possible worlds."

"Miss Edgeworth is a most agreeable person, very natural, clever, and well informed, without the least pretensions of authorship. She had never been in a large society before, and she was followed and courted by all the persons of distinction in London, with an avidity almost without example. The court paid to her gave her an opportunity of showing her excellent understanding and character. She took every advantage of her situation, either for enjoyment or observation; but she remained perfectly unspoiled by the homage of the great."

"Miss Edgeworth was of diminutive stature, and apparently not beautiful. No portrait was ever taken. It seems from Scott's descriptions of her that her appearance faithfully represented the combined vivacity and good sense and amiability of her character. No one had stronger family affections, and the lives of very few authors have been as useful and honourable. The didacticism of the stories for children has not prevented their permanent popularity. Her more ambitious efforts are injured by the same tendency. She has not the delicacy of touch of Miss Austen, more than the imaginative power of Scott. But the brightness of her style, her keen observation of character, and her shrewd sense and vigour make her novels still readable, in spite of obvious artistic defects. Though her puppets are apt to be wooden, they act their parts with spirit enough to make us forgive the perpetual moral lectures."

"That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business. It is screamingly obvious in Maria Edgeworth's tales, which must have done unspeakable damage to ordinary people.—Be good, and you'll have money. Be wicked, and you'll be utterly penniless at last, and the good ones will have to offer you a little charity."

"She was a nice little unassuming ‘Jeanie Deans’-looking bodie,’ as we Scotch say—and, if not handsome, certainly not ill-looking. Her conversation was as quiet as herself. One would never have guessed she could write her name; whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if nothing else was worth writing."

"My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own."

"A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend."

"Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended…The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive."

"To our unhappy sex genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of Heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison."

"We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters."

"A love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it."

"Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart."

"It is unjust and absurd of those advancing in years, to expect of the young that confidence should come all and only on their side: the human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return."

"Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget."

"One of the vilest men of his time."

"El original es infiel a la traducción."

"Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport."

"I have made up my mind to like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, yours and my own."

"Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours."

"Quand il étoit en colère, un de ses yeux devenoit si terrible qu'on n'en pouvoit pas soutenir les regards: le malheureux sur lequel il le fixoit tomboit à la renverse, & quelquefois même expiroit à l'instant. Aussi, dans la crainte de dépeupler ses états, & de faire un désert de son palais, ce prince ne se mettoit en colère que très-rarement."

"J'aurois grande envie de voir ce palais souterrein, rempli d'objets intéressans pour les gens de notre espèce; il n'est rien que j'aime autant que les caverns; mon goût pour les cadavres & les momies est décidé."

"Je n'aime pas à résister à la tentation."

"Eternal Power! Grant me through obvious clouds one transient gleam Of thy bright essence in my dying hour!"

"A male Horace Walpole."