“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.”

The History of the Worthies of England (1662) ; Worthies of Huntingtonshire – John Yong.

1940s, To Every Briton (1940)
Context: This war has descended upon mankind as a curse and a warning. It is a curse inasmuch as it is brutalizing man on a scale hitherto unknown. All distinctions between combatants and noncombatants have been abolished. No one and nothing is to be spared. Lying has been reduced to an art. Britain was to defend small nationalities. One by one they have vanished, at least for the time being. It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. I read the writing when the hostilities broke out. But I had not the courage to say the word. God has given me the courage to say it before it is too late.

Freud and the Future (1937)

Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah

Watching Water

"Review of Meet Mr. Grizzly by Montague Stevens" [1944]; Published in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (eds.) 1990, p. 220.
1940s

Afterword to The Dud Avocado (2006)
Context: The reviews were excellent and the book quickly went into a second printing. Then one night Ken came home and threw a copy of the book out the window. "You weren’t a writer when I married you, you were an actress," he said angrily. Obviously his colleagues had been riding him because of the attention I was receiving. I was shattered. The next day, he said, "I’ve been rereading your book. There’s love on every page." And then he gave me a beautiful red leather-bound copy of it with the inscription: "From the Critic to the Author." Looking at it I felt a pang. I wondered if it was his admission of what I’d done that he had not.
To my wonder and, it appeared, his annoyance, the book wouldn’t go away.