I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.

I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

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 true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.

It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.