That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.

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

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.