Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

the worstthing that ever happenedtothe worldwasthe white man coming across gun powder.–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy

Is there any success without an effort?

Love warms the heart.

What thou art that thou art.

No one is fine on his own. People just say they are.

Makers of empire, they have fought for bigger things than crowns and higher seats than thrones.

If the husband sits on a chair in the Garden of Eden, his wife is his footstool.

The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.

There is no pleasure subtler than the sensation of being a good workman; and in work there is the sense of consanguinity-unconscious as a rule but sometimes conscious.

I think that you only occasionally have to play evil because everything you're doing is.