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.

All my life I have said, "Whatever happens there will always be tables and chairs"--and what a mistake.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.