If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

Before I was ten I became critical of the anthropomorphic God as interpreted in the churches. I did not warm to One thus revealed as the semblance of a bullying and mean old man who must have all his own way, be praised all the time and for attributes which were deplorable in us.

What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.

Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings.

I never can see why they make such a fuss and get so frightened because wimmen does a thing or two now they usedn't to. Nothing short of a earthquake can make them not men an' wimmmen, an' that's the main thing.

It is the highest form of culture and craftmanship in art to use local materials. That way you stand a chance of adding to culture. The other way you are in danger of merely imitating it.

I early became conscious that men breathe more audibly than women. Sit in a room in silence with men and women, and you can always hear the men breathing.