“Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,”

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholy new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,With shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquerBy strength and submission, has already been discoveredOnce or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hopeTo emulate - but there is no competition -There is only the fight to recover what has been lostAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditionsThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

“In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”

“Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but passé. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.”

“There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.”

“Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. […] Consider a word that refers to a thing- “ umbrella”, for example. […] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. […] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? […] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing.”