He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

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

Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen.... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.