He was grotesque, really. But joy radiated from his homespuns when you walked beside him. It welled out; it enveloped you. - Ford Madox Ford

(You cannot control your imagination’s pictures.

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities — even merely with the velvet.

No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.