“Sometimes snakes can't slough. They can't burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern.”

Using the snake's skin as an image for the danger of failing to change · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Mortality
• Time

“The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn't go back: and Gauguin couldn't really go back: and I know now that I could never go back.”

Reflecting on the impossibility of recovering an abandoned past unchanged · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Memory
• Time

“Truth lives from day to day, and the marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh to-day.”

Insisting that truth must remain alive to changing experience rather than become fixed doctrine · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Time
• Truth

“I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce.”

Turning dislike of northern cold into a characteristically physical image · Letter to John Middleton Murry, 3 October 1924

• Nature
• Time

“The individual soul is not a fixed thing, but a flowing, changing thing.”

Emphasising the fluidity and continuing transformation of personal identity · Essay on psychology and consciousness

• Time
• Truth

“The individual is not a thing, but a process.”

Expressing his view of identity as living change rather than fixed essence · Essay

• Identity
• Time

“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”

Urging active engagement with life rather than excessive self-preservation · Essay

• Joy
• Mortality
• Time