a sarcastic expression, on a beast, is far more sinister than rage.

How different a loved and familiar spot appears, when viewed with the eye of probable guests.

With writing ... you must keep in the habit. After a lapse it will take you not an hour, but a week, a month, maybe, to find your mood again - that mood in which things drop from heaven. There's no forcing it; you can't set your notions in front of you, and stare at them till they take shape; they have to come to you whether you ask them or not. ... And you have to be in the habit of that mood! Of inspiration!

But I shall like my battle. This sort of day puts one in mood for it. Plenty of wood in the shed, jam and potatoes and apples in the cellar, hay and oats and Cressy in the barn. Pooh - what is winter?

What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess!

the breeze brought us a faint sound, as of a distant rat, a huge and mystic rat, gnawing, maybe, at the horizon!

timeliness is an enemy to art.