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

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.

that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.

For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.

how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!