The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.

It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn't it.

You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.