some stories don't need telling

You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.

She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.

There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

"I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,
It is always to leave the best untold."

-from "A Song of the Rolling Earth"

"Damn it," he mumbled apologetically, "things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold."
She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer"

Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.

Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only — finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and you past doings have been kist like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'. [...] I shouldn't mind learning why — why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike, [...] but that's what books will not tell me.

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page