How happy is the Optimist / To whom life shows its sunny side / His horse may lose, his ship may list, / But he always sees the funny side.

Children from ten to twenty don't want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated.

This is the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe.

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

Let others, worn with living / And living's aftermath, / Take Sleep to heal the heart's distress, / Take Love to be their comfortress, / Take Song or Food or Fancy Dress, / But I shall take a Bath.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.