"It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is."

“Life did not present its sunny side to thee.”

“Although we do come from a silent profession, it is important for us to verbalize what we want to say. (As I tell my students): you could love someone all your life, but if you never say it how are they going to know? There comes a point when you have to say what you mean, which makes you scream louder when you dance.”

“Soloing is serious business, because you can be seriously dead.”

“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”

“One day you'll have a quiet heart.”

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”

Source : Sylvia Townsend Warner (1978). “Lolly Willowes: or, The loving huntsman”, Charles River Books

“Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.”

Source : James Fitzjames Stephen (1991). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: And Three Brief Essays”, p.70, University of Chicago Press

“What a writer brought to a book didn't matter as much as what the reader contributed.”