As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

I press to my centre, and find there is something there.

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.