The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.

Of course it's all right for librarians to smell of drink.

I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that's all.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]

The activities in a society is determined by its establishment

The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.

Simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.

We repeal sanctions, it tells Russia, go ahead and interfere in our elections and do bad things; it tells China, it tells Iran. That would be terrible.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

I never eat sushi. I have trouble eating things that are merely unconscious.

I'm frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

Even today with the problems that we face, who would you rather be? Which country would you trade places with?