Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.

Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.