It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning... - Randall Jarrell

This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

We live in an age which eschews sentimentality as if it were a good deal more than the devil. (Actually, of course, a writer may be just as sentimental in laying undue emphasis on sexual crimes as on dying mothers: sentimental, like scientific, is an adjective that relates to method, not to matter.)