happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.

We envy people we love for being always in their own loved company.

Understanding, above all, is a gift we should never offer uninvited.

The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do.

It is always one of the tragedies of any relationship, even between people sensitive to each other's moods, that the moments of emotion so rarely coincide.

Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.