My mind is not suited to go much into company.

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

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

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

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.