"My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as though one remembered some first moments of the Seven Days."

Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, p. 41

"I spent my days at the British Museum and must, I think, have been delicate, for I remember often putting off hour after hour consulting some necessary book because I shrank from lifting the heavy volumes of the catalogue; and yet to save money for my afternoon coffee and roll I often walked the whole way home to Bedford Park."

The Trembling of the Veil, Four Years: 1887-1891, p. 137

"I generalized a great deal and was ashamed of it. I thought it was my business in life to be an artist and a poet, and that there could be no business comparable to that. I refused to read books and even to meet people who excited me to generalization, all to no...