It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.

I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.