The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?

"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

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.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.