For the last six weeks I have found myself pestered by some characters in search of an author.

How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.

When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.

There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.

... the advantages of being a postman seemed more and more dubious. It is not a congenial profession for anyone who is at all sensitive, for people visit upon the postman all their first annoyance at receiving a couple of bills when they looked for a love-letter, and if a packet is insufficiently stamped they hand over the pennies as though to a despicable bandit, too outrageous to be denied, too groveling to be feared.

Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken.

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.