One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me ... his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.

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.

Sleeping in a bed -- it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

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?

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.