I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

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.

See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.

a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality.

There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment.

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.