I wanted to know more about the young ... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.

The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.

I was wandering around as usual, in my unpleasantly populated sub-conscious.

a loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation.

Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That's not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It's just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.