however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.

Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.

The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.