Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

I am infinitely strange to myself.