Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.

But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees

For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands.

We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.