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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dear Boss! Don't be a boss-hole.

To love, and be loved, this is the greatest challenge that any of us face in our lives.

The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.

If poverty makes man groan, he yawns in opulence. When fortune exempts us from labor, nature overwhelms us with time.

The priesthood hath in all nations, and all religions, been held highly venerable.

I don't know whether guys are more promiscuous or just bigger liars.

We were cowards when we sacked him.

A thicket of summer grass / Is all that remains / Of the dreams of ancient warriors.

What men have seen they know; But what shall come hereafter No man before the event can see, Nor what end waits for him.