John Galsworthy

There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.

She made up her mind to tell them to play loud--there was a lot of music in a cornet, if the man would only put his soul into it.

But dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision . . .

. . . May night had fallen soft and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.

Beneath all manner of kindness and consideration for each other--for their good taste, at all events, had never given way--this tragedy of a woman, who wanted to be loved, slowly killing the power of loving her in the man, had gone on year after year.

A marvellous speeder-up of Love is War. What might have taken six months, was thus accomplished in three weeks.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.

The talked-about is always the last to hear the talk . . .

. . . for events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

The Rector of Worsted Skeynes was not tall, and his head had been rendered somewhat bald by thought.

He woke at half-past two, an hour which long experience had taught him brings panic intensity to all awkward thoughts. Experience had also taught him that a further waking at the proper hour of eight showed the folly of such panic.

. . . Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower and when it blooms outside we call a weed but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild

Even grief sobbed itself out in time only Time was good for sorrow--Time who saw the passing of each mood, each emotion in turn Time the layer-to-rest.

When a man with the constitution of Montague Dartie has exercised self control for months from religious motives, and remains unrewarded, he does not curse God and die, he curses God and lives, to the distress of his family.

He was frightened by the effect he had produced, and like most men with but little courage, he sought at once to justify himself by bullying.

Hilary was no young person, like his niece or Martin, to whom everything seemed simple nor was he an old person like their grandfather, for whom life had lost its complications.

When one grew old, the whole world was in conspiracy to limit freedom, and for what reason--just to keep the breath in him a little longer. He did not want it at such cost.

. . . as he had often forcibly argued, all experience tended to show that a man must die and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love.

There is left in every man something of the primeval love of stalking.

Very haughty' he said, the wild Buccaneer.'

As for the law--it catered for a human nature of which it took a naturally low view.

. . . early morning does not mince words . . .