“It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrit...” — Arnold Bennett Quote

“It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is — as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced.”

“Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.”

“The moment you're born you're done for.”

“To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.”

“Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.”

“We need a sense of the value of time - that is, of the best way to divide one's time into one's various activities.”

“Human beings went through the trouble of inventing rules that imposed limits on their lives, boxing them up into hours, days, and years. And then they invented clocks to make time's rule over us even more precise.”

“Time is passing quickly”

“They won't be a right be a right time, Thea, it doesn't exist. Just get it over with”

“There are memories that time does not erase... Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”

“How often we have to thank the sense of beauty of some former country worker for sparing a sapling when cutting a hedge or taking a slip of some doomed tree and setting it 'quick i' the earth' to bloom for those who have come after.”