She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

One can learn, at least. One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.

To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.

Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on for ever, and a kind of tamped-down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect; you are barely conscious of it while you have it.

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.