Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!

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.

Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.

I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.

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