The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will not have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

I would have gone too but I wanted to come straight back to you.I kept thinking of you, waiting here, all by yourself, not knowing what was going to happen.

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then—how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal.

People who travel are always fugitives.

I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.

I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.