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.

It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

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.