School is a foretaste of life.

The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year.

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.

The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.