“So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary...”

“Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.”

“Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.”

“Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.”

“I know that, like many other writers, I have many faults, for I am the first to be dissatisfied with myself . . . At the moment when I am trying to review my life's work, I often realize with pain that I have literally failed to express one-twentieth part of what I had wanted to, and perhaps could have expressed. The thing that comforts me is the constant hope that one day God will grant me so much inspiration . . . that I shall be able to express myself more fully, that, in short, I shall express all that is locked in my heart and in my imagination . . . I cannot help feeling that there is much more hidden in me than I have hitherto been able to express as a writer. And yet, speaking without false modesty, there is a great deal that is true and that came from my heart in what I have expressed already.”

“Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.”