How slowly one comes to understand anything!

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.