A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city. |
God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest. |
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch. |
Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up. |
I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism |
I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously? |
In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets. |
It was not... that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down. |
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. |
Jealousy, he thought, was as physical as fear; the same dryness of the mouth, the thudding heart, the restlessness which destroyed appetite and peace. |
No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. |
She was a buxom grandmother noted for her detective stories, who gazed mournfully at the camera as if deploring either the bloodiness of her craft or the size of her advance. |
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment. |
We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends. |
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give. |