"[T]he delight in natural things—colours, forms, scents—when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended."

"[M]y credo is very short. Its first article is art—and its second is art—and its third is art!"

"All things change,—creeds and philosophies and outward systems,—but God remains!"

"Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!"

"But the mind travels far—and mysteriously—in sleep."

"To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age."

"I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else."

"It's not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair. It's the hope."

"To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell."

"The more you try to describe a dream the further it eludes your grasp, retreating before the advance of the words, growing cooler and cooler and paler and paler, until, when you have recorded it all, there is nothing of what it was really like left in your memory."

"One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog.""

"If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself."

"Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee, Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art? Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee, Thou little heart?"

"Breathe slumbrous music round me, sweet and slow, To honied phrases set! Into the land of dreams I long to go. Bid me forget!"

"Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?— Moths that a garment fret. The world is turned memorial, crying, "Thou Shalt not forget!""

"If I wrote a book about England I should call it What About Wednesday Week? which is what English people say when they are making what they believe to be an urgent appointment."

"A newspaper is always a weapon in somebody's hands."

"Since becoming a journalist I had often heard the advice to "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"."

"The hired journalist, I thought, ought to realize that he is partly in the entertainment business and partly in the advertising business – advertising either goods, or a cause, or a government. He just has to make up his mind whom he wants to entertain, and what he wants to advertise."

"There is nothing quite so terrifying as a mad sheep."

"Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.""

"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce."

"He [Brendan Bracken] had been upset by my observation that a wartime Minister of Information was compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig."

"A devout and serious Christian, she was often bothered by what she read of socialists because she could not, instantly and absolutely, see where they were so wrong. To her horrified ear, they kept sounding as though they had ideas rather like Christ's."

"The pure, the beautiful, the bright, That stirred our hearts in youth, The impulse to a wordless prayer, The dreams of love and truth, The longings after something lost, The spirit’s yearning cry, The strivings after better hopes,— These things can never die."

"I send thee pansies while the year is young, Yellow as sunshine, purple as the night; Flowers of remembrance, ever fondly sung By all the chiefest of the Sons of Light."

"And a proverb haunts my mind As a spell is cast, "The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.""

"But the waiting time, my brothers, Is the hardest time of all."

"Prudent readers will do well to hold Three Weeks at arm's length, unless they want to be cut by flying adjectives."

"Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin? Or would you prefer To err With her On some other fur?"

"Would you please publish the enclosed manuscript or return it without delay, as I have other irons in the fire."

"I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like It were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading Henry James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down."

"No matter what he does, one always forgives him. It does not depend upon looks, either – although this actual person is abominably good-looking – it does not depend upon intelligence or character or – anything – as you say, it is just "it"."

"A madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake."

"To have "It", the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others. There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary."

"And loveliest sight of all, in front of the fire, stretched at full length, was his tiger – and on him – also at full length – reclined the lady, garbed in some strange clinging garment of heavy purple crepe, its hem embroidered with gold, one white arm resting on the beast's head, her back supported by a pile of the velvet cushions, and a heap of rarely bound books at her side, while between her red lips was a rose not redder than they – an almost scarlet rose."

"He had that nameless charm, with a strong magnetism which can only be called "It", and cats – as well as women – always knew when he came into the room."

"I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned."

"Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward."

"What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen."

"London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

"The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation."

"The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup"."

"He had the satisfied countenance of a man who has never succeeded in boring himself."

"No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there."

"One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines."

"Who could so watch, and not forget the rack Of wills worn thin and thought become too frail, Nor roll the centuries back — And feel the sinews of his soul grow hale, And know himself for Rome's inheritor?"

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "There's Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" … Shall you mind?"

"I have been reading Grey Wethers—a magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!"