Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.