Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.

he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action.

Although it is great to know, it is better to be told, 'I love you.' Whose day can you make better today by simply saying, 'I love you?' Now do the thing you know better to do.

Consider the lilies of the field how they grow they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

If you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply.

You can't just drop the 82nd Airborne into Baghdad and it will all be over.

Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck.

She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

I think that the history of the past hundred years has shown us that, by and large, the one linguistic group to whom separatism is being preached is not moved by the arguments which are used.