Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'-William Boot

Dearest Charles-- I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. Love or what you will. S.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance ... It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis on which it rests ... Christianity ... is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.