No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.