If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

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.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

If you wake up in the morning with a great sense of the things that have to be done in the day in order to get through to the next day, you lose the sense of the day as any kind of end in itself.

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.

Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.