I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.