Status Updates From Ellas

'For the more you are under the obsession of a book the less of articulate language you have to use concerning it.'

'He was always imagining himself; it is difficult to decide how much of genuine feeling he put into these imaginations. He had affairs with half-a-dozen ladies before he married; he went through ecstasy and anguish; they failed him or they did not deserve him; but he was never driven from his elegant and half quizzical attitude, like a man who is conscious that he has the eye of the audience upon him.'

'Yet we are perpetually conscious that, if Dostoevsky fails to keep within the proper limits, it is because the fervour of his genius goads him across the boundary. Because of his sympathy his laughter passes beyond merriment into a strange violent amusement which is not merry at all.'

'Dostoevsky has the power of reconstructing these most swift and complicated states of mind, of re-thinking the whole train of thought in all its speed, now as it flashes into light, now as it lapses into darkness..he is able to follow not only the vivid streak of achieved thought but to suggest the dim and populous underworld of the mind's consciousness where desires and impulses are moving blindly beneath the sod.'

'but perhaps if one feared for [Rupert Brooke] at all it was lest the pull of all his gifts in their different directions might somehow rend him asunder.'

'[Sheridan] had played a distinguished but not a commanding part as a statesman, and flitted through the society of the Georgian era, a brilliant but slightly intoxicated insect, with gorgeous wings but an erratic flight.'

'For the more you are under the obsession of a book the less articulate language you have to use concerning it. You creep along after such shocks, like some bewildered animal, whose head, struck by a flying stone, flashes with all manner of sharp lightnings.'

'There is no novel by Mr Conrad which has not passages of such beauty that one hangs over them like a humming-bird moth at the mouth of a flower. Yet I believe that one pays for such beauty in a novel. To achieve it the writer had had to shut off his energy in other directions. Hence, I think, so many pages of Mr Conrad's novels are slack and slumberous, monotonous like the summer sea.'