I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.

Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.