What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.