Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

There are no signposts in the sea.

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

Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.

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.

My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.