What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.

Well, I for one am unable to imagine how anybody who lives with an intelligent and devoted dog can every be lonely.

But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.

And the summer seems as though it would dream on for ever.

She had been dragged in the most humiliating of all dusts, the dust reserved for older women who let themselves be approached, on amorous lines, by boys... It had all been pure vanity, all just a wish, in these waning days of hers, still to feel power, still to have the assurance of her beauty and its effects.

Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.

Love isn't decent. Love is glorious and shameless.