Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.