It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

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.

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.

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

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.