There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

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.

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

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.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.