Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious - there was generally some reason for it.

Beginnings are always messy.

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands - a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.

He was afflicted by the thought that where Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight, which no doubt, was why so many people looked on it as immoral.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.