Human creatures have a mervellous power of adapting themselves to necessity.

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

Parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of grass.

That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?

How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.

One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray.... [H]ow delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot!... What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain!