It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures; charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed, with companions of their own age and selection.

miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals -- or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

Traveling together is a great test, which has damaged many friendships and even honeymoons, and some people such as [Thomas] Gray and Horace Walpole, never feel quite the same to one another again, and it is nobody's fault, as one knows if one listens to the stories of both, though it seems to be some people's fault more than others.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.