The Huxleys are remembered as a scientific dynasty, but they are at least as significant as a literary family.

The Huxleys are remembered as a scientific dynasty, but they are at least as significant as a literary family. They wrote in multiple genres and for different audiences, in private and public. That the Arnolds grafted onto the Huxleys in the middle generation, meant that this became a conjoined highly regarded literary figures – Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley, Mary Augusta Ward – and of essayists, memoirists and science writers - Thomas Henry, Leonard and Julian. More privately, though still intermittently in published form, all of the Huxleys were poets. This was a family of professional wordsmiths.

A. Bashford, An intimate history of evolution (2022), 30

Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income

In describing himself as a Promethean saviour, a voluntary scapegoat for the suffering of the people, Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income, the dukedom, the absolute power, the precedence over princes of the blood, the fawnings and flatteries of all who approached him.

A. Huxley, Grey Eminence (1941), 147

These pleasant, friendly people ... they were all heretics, and therefore irrevocably doomed

He enjoyed himself in England, and he liked the English. And precisely because he like them, his happy exhilaration at being among them evaporated. These pleasant, friendly people, who spoke Latin with such a deliciously comic accent - they were all heretics, and therefore irrevocably doomed.

A. Huxley, Grey Eminence (1941), 33

And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you

And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. Nobody, except a mystical pantheist, like Van Gogh, can seriously be as much interested in napkins, apples and bottles as in his lover's face, or the resurrection, or the destiny of man. Could Mantegna have devised his splendid compositions if he had painted arrangements of Chianti flasks and cheeses instead of Crucifixions, martyrs and triumphs of the great men? Nobody but a fool could believe it.

A. Huxley, Antic Hay (1923), 85

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?'

'Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope around her neck and he's got hold of two pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all it was an accident. He didn't know the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper... And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was to stop being married. The stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everyone had to die of a virus - all that was just nonsense just made up by a  lot of poor stupid people who din't know any better.'

A. Huxley, Island (1962), 253