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.

librarianship is one of the few callings in the world for which is it still possible to feel unqualified admiration and respect.

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.

A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful it is something a little more than that; if unsuccessful, a little less. In either case, a fresh complication is added to the already intricate business of friendship: as Clem had once remarked, you might as well try to dance a tarantella with a Siamese twin.

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

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

Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them.