One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.

Rouen shone in dark sunlight and a storm swept it away from my eyes and churned up the broad river with waves which pounced up like cats as our train drew out of the arches of the bridge.

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.

... 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.

Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones.

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.