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As Katherine Mansfield said when she read Ulysses, this is obviously the wave of the future, I’m glad I’m dying of tuberculosis.”

At 26 we are almost 30 actually, and I woke with a powerful knock of awareness at my heart, my eyes flew open, I saw time flying like an enormous bird. We are getting to our age of most power, our peak. I feel older and clearer than I ever did—though at the same time more irretrievable isolated in the huge dream of the world.

I want to write about the crazy generation and put them on the map and give them importance and make everything begin to change once more, as it always does every twenty years.

The abyss is more real than present flesh or future fancy.

The strength of an Other lies in the ability to use the human Power flowing through all levels of the Twilight. Our world is like an immense plain covered with tiny springs that give out Power but do not know how to use it. We Others are merely the channels into which this water flows from the hundreds and thousands of springs.

It's easier to apply protective spells that prevent long-distance sensing to files made from organic materials. It's the same reason why we use only books for studying magic. When a text is typed into a computer, it doesn't retain any of the magic.

The silence was total in this part of the village. There was no sound of cicadas. In the distance, only faintly audible, came the Hawaiian music from the yacht, a tinny and derisive tinkling.

All through my life I have been plagued by enjoying first experiences too much, and that is true also of my first experiences of new people. How wonderful they seem the first few times, how clever, how beautiful, how right; how nice one seems to them because so interested, how well it all goes and then how dull it becomes and flat.

Most people remember very little of when they were small and what small part of this time there is that stays is coloured it is only fair to say, coloured and readjusted until the picture which was there, what does come back, has been over-painted and retouched enough to make it an unreliable account of what used to be.

This is written from Majorca, which tourist agents call 'The Island of Love', adding that the sun always shines in Majorca, and that it is always summertime here. Don't be misled! It is always summertime here because we put the clock one hour back several years ago—for daylight saving—and have never since put it forward again; this is very hard on my sun-dial which is always an hour wrong now.

The English masses have fallen away spectacularly from their nineteenth century Protestantism and prefer to believe in some form of reincarnation.

Anglo-American avarice and greed was not the underlying factor in Pico's demise. He and his Californio counterparts were often fiercely independent and dictated their own fates.

Of the truly great authors no one has complained that they over-elaborated. On the contrary, we usually bemoan the fact that there is nothing further left us to read. And so we turn back to what we have and we re-read, and as we re-read we discover marvels which previously we had ignored. We go back to them again and again, as to inexhaustible wells of wisdom and delight.

[James] Joyce is the lost soul of this soulless world; his interest is not in life, in men and deeds, not in history, not in God, but in the dead dust of books. He is the high priest of the lifeless literature of to-day. He writes a hieratic script which not even his admirers and disciples can decipher. He is burying himself under an obelisk for whose script there will be no key.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions.

Like all persons prone to hysteria, Branwell magnified his offences: he was guilty beyond redemption, he had sunk lower than the lowest. He, Branwell Brontë, the brilliant versatile genius of the family, had not been able to hold down the trumpery job of station-master on a branch line.

She was apparently seeking the connection that must exist between the elfin thing she'd been until her teens and the woman of reasonable, solid, and cautious body that she was now.

The truth was so fast. You had to squint. It was occurring to her in strange and swift seconds of vision that her communication with the world, that secret atmosphere that she was cultivating around herself like a darkness, was her final existence—beyond that border she herself was silent like a thing.

All night she'd watched the armchair from afar desiring undetectedly to sit on it. In truth she had always lived as if on the verge of things.

She almost didn't have desires, she almost didn't possess strength, she was living at the end of herself and at the beginning of something that no longer was, finding her balance in the indistinct.

‘It’s all these cursed women!’ muttered Grimsby: ‘they’re the very bane of the world! They bring trouble and discomfort wherever they come, with their false, fair faces and their deceitful tongues.’

I received an irate call from an irate producer, whose series I’d bummed in these pages, assuring me that I was a toad and that I would never work on that series. (This, gentle readers, is a threat roughly as imposing as telling a man who has just crawled out of the Gobi Desert on hands and knees that he cannot have a peanut butter sandwich.)

Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for
true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history. He is no such honest chronicler as R.N., and would have done
better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent these
incondite reminiscences to press.

I have never made an acquaintance since, that
lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some
tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest
obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall
commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will
not betray or overreach you.

There is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

[B]eauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.

When letters begin again, how many other such pieces of news shall we all receive? Which of our close friends and relations are already dead, or will die before we meet them again? And, even among those who survive, what barriers of constraint and unfamiliarity will have arisen in these years—not only of physical separation, but of experience unshared, of differing feelings and opinions? What ties will survive?

What took place at the meeting between [the King and Mussolini], who were alone, is not known. What is certain is, that when Mussolini came out and looked around for his car, the officer on guard at the gate requested him instead to enter a Red Cross closed ambulance, in which he found his doctor waiting. And so he drove quietly away—from Villa Savoia and from power.