So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in...We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

I had committed myself: without love I'd have to go through the gestures of love.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.