It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch.

The importance of the ordinary citizen is very greatly underestimated - not so much by those in authority as by the ordinary citizen himself.

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.

To visit a new country for the first time is great fun; but it is even greater fun to introduce somebody else to a country that you know.

There was one bursting now, a delicate constellation of many-coloured stars which drifted down and lingered in the still air.... The final rocket went up, a really large one, a piece of reckless extravagance. Its sibilant uprush was impressive, dragonlike; it soared twice as high as any they had had before.... The sparks from the rocket came pouring down the sky in a slow golden cascade, vanishing one by one into a lake of darkness.

One is what one remembers: no more, no less.

The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.