Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.