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1 " It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you. "
― Kingsley Amis , The Green Man
2 " I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. "
3 " There are other things to a woman than taking her to bed. "
4 " I am too old a hand to be put off pleasure by even the certain prospect of not enjoying it. "
5 " I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarmé and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous. "
6 " Nothing short of physical handicap has ever made anybody turn over a new leaf. "
7 " The trouble with the hypochondriac is that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times. "
