I cannot remember a time when I was not enraptured or tortured by words. Always there have been words which, sometimes for their sound alone, sometimes for their sound and sense, I would not use. From a loathing of their grossness or sickliness, their weight or want of weight. Their inexactitude, their feeling of acidity or insipidity. Their action, not only on the intelligence but on the nerves, was instant.

I am old enough to remember what it was like when the theories of Freud first escaped from the study and the clinic, and the great game of Hunt-the Complex began, to the entertainment and alarm of a war-shattered and disillusioned world.

Not till the end of the war will there be any time for art or love or magic again. Perhaps never again.

I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin.

The truth which may not be told, is the truth which cannot be told.

For watching death, and above all, after death; not death in battle, but death after battle, brings one to certain indifferences that are also a form of death.

It is in the nature of any effort to leave something serviceable behind it.