I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.

A journey is a fragment of Hell.

Because they knew each other's thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.

It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.