Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.

Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.