Writers And Lovers Book Quotes

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom.

Books are the flung-open windows to a parallel universe.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

Some books send you around the world, while others send you around the bend.

I write to find strength. I write to become the person that hides inside me. I write to light the way through the darkness for others. I write to be seen and heard. I write to be near those I love. I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper. I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear. I write past the embarrassment of exposure. I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal. I write myself out of nightmares. I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings. I write to remember. I write knowing conversations don’t always take place. I write because speaking can’t be reread. I write to sooth a mind that races. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand. I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide. I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long. I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be. I write to provide a legacy. I write to make sense out of senselessness. I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding. I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers. I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time. I write because God loves stories. I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.

If you want to find out if someone is a true bookworm or not, give them a thousand page novel and see what happens.

I thought of writing a summary about you, but when I finished it was a book.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

All I need to do is place my pen against paper and your love writes for me.

It's a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

Poetry is jealous of you tonight, for as soon as I come to pen a few words, your perfume attacks me in the most civilised manner and I forget myself. I forget the poem. I forget the ...

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking

The pages of a book are given life only as they are opened

I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.

Something significant, magical, and inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.

There are but twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, yet I must have read a quadrillion words.

The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals

I ain't a lover, but I want to love all your crazy imperfections, I ain't a diver, but I want to dive into your deep warm emotions, I ain't a reader, but I want to read messages send by your eyes, I ain't a skylark, but I want to sing for your mesmerizing smile, I ain't a gardener, but I want to plant seeds of ecstasy in your heart, I ain't a writer, but I want to write about how special you're.

You can edit what you write. Why not edit what you say? If it hurts somebody, you can still offer an apology or withdraw your statements

Many writers write because they’ve been there, seen that, did it and burnt their fingers

A writer is never alone, he is always with himself

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down

That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature

Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself. "Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write). "But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.

The best gift you can give me is a book.

Don't read a book to let the time pass...let the time pass to read a book.

Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true

People speak even after their death. Only do speak those who have recorded their speech in writing before they die, the rest go silent forever

We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers

If you can't write, read. If you can't read, walk. Or walk and read, then write.

Writing is exposing yourself to strangers

I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that's still inside me.

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

Readers are the glue that binds the books together.

I came to pen another poem for you, but even every unwritten poem is you.

I am a passionate reader. New interested books keep adding on my reading list. My wildest dream is to complete reading all the books.

You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

. If you want to write, just write anything that comes into your mind. You will be surprised at how you can force inspiration to stand on your side.

One of the ways that a writer heals an invisible wound is through book therapy.

A writer reports on the universe. When he presents his credentials, the gates of heaven and hell are equally opened to him. He can hear the devil’s defense and god’s accusations. The guards at the king’s heart let him in. The writer can be anything and any one he wants. When he writes he is a god, he creates.

One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants

Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.

So many books to read, will I ever finish reading?

One day I will write a book. An epitaph

I have only dwelt in my thoughts.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

I am what I have ever read

The stretches, called the Five Tibetan Rites, came to the Western world, and to me, by way of writer Peter Kelder, who was known as a lover of “books and libraries, words and poetry.

You see that girl, she looks so happy right? But inside she's dying. She's hurt and tired. Tired of all the drama, tired of not being good enough, tired of life. But she doesn't want to look dramatic, weak or attention seeking so she keeps it all inside. Act's like everything's perfect but she cries at night, boy does she cry at night, so that everybody thinks she is the happiest person they know, that she has no problems and her life is perfect. Little do they know.

A story written without heart and soul is dead.

Books are not simply words on a page. They're brimming with magic just waiting to fill your dreams.

But the book! The siren song of the book!

I had a dream about you last night. I was writing a ‘Sex for dummies-Christians That Secretly What to be Porn Stars- 1st edition.’ And you helped me with the illustrations.

A real and admirable writer is the one who can write good books but can take criticisms better.

I began to write because of love. I wrote to understand what I felt and what I knew.

Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer.

The power of the writer is to capture the thoughts live and present them as they appeared in his mind

Writing is sharing. You share what you have. Great writers have more to share

Writing is magic happening on paper

A writer is a thought smith; he educates men to think for themselves

Desire for books, desire to read.

every word and its sound shall generate the same form in the mind of both the reader and its author

All kinds of people read poetry: revolutionaries, scholars, sentimentalists etc. But above all else, lovers read poetry. Why? Because we fell in love. And then we fell in love with love.

These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.

The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible.

But this, I realize, is what they mean, all those thousands of writers who’ve tried to describe the sensation of following the trail of your life for years, only to smack into something that changes it forever. The way the sensation jars through you, from the center out. How you feel it in your mouth and toes all at once, a dozen tiny explosions. And then an unfurling of warmth from your collarbone to your ribs, to thighs, to palms, like just seeing him has triggered some kind of chrysalis. My body has moved from winter into spring, all those scraggly little sprouts pushing up through a crush of snow. Spring, alive and awake in my bloodstream. “Stephens,” Charlie says softly, like a swear, or a prayer, or a mantra.

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.

Sometimes even a monster is no monster. Sometimes it's beautiful and we fall in love with all that story, more than any film or TV program could ever hope to provide. Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain. It's similar with books. Not quite the same, of course (it never is); but similar. If you quite enjoy a writer's work, if you turn the page approvingly yet don't mind being interrupted, then you tend to like that author unthinkingly. Good chap, you assume. Sound fellow. They say he strangled an entire pack of Wolf Cubs and fed their bodies to a school of carp? Oh no, I'm sure he didn't; sound fellow, good chap. But if you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him -- despite edicts to the contrary -- then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well. A pack of Wolf Cubs, eh? Was that twenty-seven or twenty-eight? And did he have their little scarves sewn up into a patchwork quilt? And is it true that as he ascended the scaffold he quoted from the Book of Jonah? And that he bequeathed his carp pond to the local Boy Scouts? But here's the difference. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst -- be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark -- you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? With a writer you love, the instinct is to defend. This is what I meant earlier: perhaps love for a writer is the purest, the steadiest form of love. And so your defense comes the more easily. The fact of the matter is, carp are an endangered species, and everyone knows that the only diet they will accept if the winter has been especially harsh and the spring turns wet before St Oursin's Day is that of young minced Wolf Cub. Of course he knew he would hang for the offense, but he also knew that humanity is not an endangered species, and reckoned therefore that twenty-seven (did you say twenty-eight?) Wolf Cubs plus one middle-ranking author (he was always ridiculously modest about his talents) were a trivial price to pay for the survival of an entire breed of fish. Take the long view: did we need so many Wolf Cubs? They would only have grown up and become Boy Scouts. And if you're still so mired in sentimentality, look at it this way: the admission fees so far received from visitors to the carp pond have already enabled the Boy Scouts to build and maintain several church halls in the area.

A book is like a trip to a world of imagination and creativity, and those who don’t read will for ever stay in the same place.

Every stage of life is a chapter of a book.

Able writers let us into their minds and show us how they think and by that open our minds to ourselves

How do you feel when you read stuff written by dead authors? A visit by a ghost?

A writer is never alone; he is always in conversation with himself

No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when misery is at hand. That kens Thy learn’d instructor. Yet so eagerly 120 If thou art bent to know the primal root, From whence our love gat being, I will do As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day, For our delight we read of Lancelot, 4 How him love thrall’d. Alone we were, and no 125 Suspicion near us. Oft-times by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter’d cheek. But at one point Alone we fell. When of that smile we read, The wished smile so raptorously kiss’d 130 By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er From me shall separate, at once my lips All trembling kiss’d. The book and writer both Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day We read no more.

Writers write for the book lovers. And when the readers are soulful and sensitive to understand the nuances and subtleties of a story, then writing and reading the lines of your book becomes a pleasure!

When I first started following writers on social media, I imagined a deluge of profound quotes, writing tips and insights into the plight of wordsmiths. There was some of that. Mostly though, my timeline was taken up with their obsession with coffee: 'I want coffee/I'm having coffee/I've had coffee.' Then came photos of their favourite coffee mug/pot/shop/barista. So, if you've enjoyed a recently-published book, give credit to writers: the vampiric aficionados of the coffee cherry.

Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life.... What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?

In order to protect their good names for posterity, many writers never wrote what they thought or the truth as it stood. That's why truth still lies hidden in matters of power, sex and religion. No wonder they chose to do so, many who dared paid with their heads

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

If there's anything that teaching teaches teachers, it's recognition of one's limits in reaching others. Call it the reach of the teach. For every writer, most of the world is deaf. Lucy once said, "Face it -it's a busy world out there." The bus travelers made clear the reader I hoped for was not just anyone but rather someone I'd like to travel with: tolerant, curious, sense of humored, lover of language, generous of spirit; in short, somebody I could learn from. In the Ghost, maybe that someone was the blue-roads rider -or was it a writer? Whoever it was, I had to address the reader as if a rider, for in the end, the final power in any story lies not in the mind of the teller but in the imagination of the listener.

Books about books are a rare species, special tomes for writers and book lovers. More than an affirmation of taste, a book about books is often a spirited celebration and sincere investigation. Quickly coveted, it remains on that particular shelf, guarded and revered, and eventually slips out of print. What good company we will keep then, among a library lost, only momentarily invisible, waiting patiently to be found.

Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

To live, fiction must be read, and to be read it must be enjoyed. Why do so many people talk about the number of times they’ve lost interest in a book after a couple of chapters, or only “toughed it out” to the end out of a sense of obligation? I’d say it’s because too many writers have forgotten that the writer’s job isn’t merely to express himself, it’s to reach a reader. That doesn’t mean pandering to the lowest common denominator. But it does mean that even a work of smart, thoughtful fiction should strive to engage and entertain. If you’re a writer of literary fiction and all you’re bringing to the party is a poetic turn of phrase or a deep thought, that’s not enough. What about pace? Humour? Characters you care about and a smattering of suspense that makes you want to “find out what happens next?” All of these, plus rich language, bracing honesty and emotional resonance, should be components of the best, most thoughtful fiction. Because that’s the sort of reading experience that readers should be able to expect from a novel that demands hours of their time.

Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day. Philosophy, under the influence of German idealism, became solipsistic, and self-development was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics. As regards sentiment, there has to be a distasteful compromise between the search for isolation and the necessities of passion and economics. D. H. Lawrence's story, 'The Man Who Loved Islands', has a hero who disdained such compromise to a gradually increasing extent and at last died of hunger and cold, but in the enjoyment of complete isolation; but this degree of consistency has not been achieved by the writers who praise solitude. The comforts of civilized life are not obtainable by a hermit, and a man who wishes to write books or produce works of art must submit to the ministrations of others if he is to survive while he does his work. In order to continue to feel solitary, he must be able to prevent those who serve him from impinging upon his ego, which is best accomplished if they are slaves. Passionate love, however, is a more difficult matter. So long as passionate lovers are regarded as in revolt against social trammels, they are admired; but in real life the love-relation itself quickly becomes a social trammel, and the partner in love comes to be hated, all the more vehemently if the love is strong enough to make the bond difficult to break. Hence love comes to be conceived as a battle, in which each is attempting to destroy the other by breaking through the protecting walls of his or her ego. This point of view has become familiar through the writings of Strindberg, and, still more, of D. H. Lawrence. Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of one's own Self. This is feasible if the others are blood-relations, and the more nearly they are related the more easily it is possible. Hence an emphasis on race, leading, as in the case of the Ptolemys, to endogamy. How this affected Byron, we know; Wagner suggests a similar sentiment in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Nietzsche, though not scandalously, preferred his sister to all other women: 'How strongly I feel,' he writes to her, 'in all that you say and do, that we belong to the same stock. You understand more of me than others do, because we come of the same parentage. This fits in very well with my "philosophy".