When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.

Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.