Ah, when he points out what I've done or failed to do with it, that's another matter: there he's on his ground.

I give him up my 'sarchitecture,'" my distinguished friend concluded, "as much as he will." So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponibilite.
It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one's own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority.

I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting--a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse.

I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards.

I could think so little of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it.