I think it's one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.