Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom and behold it, as it were, for the first time.