Great Throughts Treasury

"I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little time."

"A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand."

"He saw his life as a good thing, and he saw happiness, towards which that life had always consciously or unconsciously struggled, as merely a relative good. The real stuff of life was experience, in which sorrow and fear and disaster had as important a part to play as beauty and joy."

"He knew how to hold a conversation in the proper way -- a way which is like an old lane, wandering from cottage to cottage and farm to farm, down to the stream and up the hill and down to the stream again, and not apparently going anywhere in particular, but getting there safely in the end."

"He saw lying behind him the whole futility of his life; it seemed to him now like a mumbled string of meaningless prayers, a foolish litany which ended in the priest falling asleep."

"It is a long, nervous, chaotic book, aiming at the sky but seldom hitting anything higher than a tree."

"It was one of the late Conservative Government's gestures towards agriculture -- graceful as a kiss, and of about as much use."

"Pictures of my life stretch back into what must have been my very earliest childhood. ... They are not movies, then, nor are they talkies, but they are quite distinctly feelies."

"Sinden spoke the rough, slurring speech of the Sussex man, with great broad vowels like pools in which the consonants drowned."

"The great question of all choosers and adventurers is 'Was it worthwhile?' -- and whatever else you may expect of life, don't expect an answer to that."

"Life justified itself. It might be cruel, treacherous, ironic, but it was life, and pain was as much a part of it as joy."

"Spring was coming back with the old promise, demanding the old sacrifice."

"The majority of human beings do not turn to God because they have not enough happiness but because happiness is not enough."