No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

... the stomach is near the heart and one appetite pricks on another.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

As often as not our whole self...engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.