I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.

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.

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.

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

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.