a perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.

Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.

I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me.

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.