The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.

If it be ungentlemanly to kiss and tell, it is still further from gentlemanliness to pray and tell.

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.