I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

rudeness to Mrs. Dosely was like dropping a pat of butter on to a hot plate - it slid and melted away.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Spoilt pleasure is a sad, unseemly thing; you can only bury it.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.