Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday.

... I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.