Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

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

children like change - for one thing, they never anticipate regret.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

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.