I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow.

Spring is strictly sentimental, self-regarding; but I burn more careless in the autumn bonfire.

Truth has beauty, power, and necessity.

General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.

We are also rather concerned about our moorhen who went mad while we were in Italy and began to build a nest in a tree. ... she walks about in the tree, looking as uneasy yet persevering as a district visitor in a brothel.

[On an anarchist acquaintance:] Everything in appearance the most alarmist aunt could wish.