Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food . . . of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns. . . . He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods . . . endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.