“The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.”

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”

“An echo makes good company, Old Margaret said. Whenever I'm lonely, I always try to find one to talk to. They're much better than mirrors. Mirrors say nasty things about you. Echoes are far more supportive. They think whatever you say is completely brilliant.”

“Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.”

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”

“It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight.”