Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.

Thinking is my fighting.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.