Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.

Joy is the serious business of heaven. Our merriment must be between people who take each other seriously.

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song and the frosty sunrise.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.