My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.These memories, which are my life–for we possess nothing certainly except the past–were always with me. Like the pigeons of...

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

The langour of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this...

Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas’ ‘Did you?’ ‘I think so. I don’t remember it much, and that’s always a good sign, isn’t it?

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist’s pride and the Philistine’s...

A whole Gothic world had come to grief…there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled…

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his...

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that’s why they like him.

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food… of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns… He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods… endless dinners, in...

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry –...

I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the...

Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I’ll sign on the dotted line.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one’s spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of...

Oh, why did nobody warn me?” cried Grimes in agony. “I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires...

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist’s pride and the philistine’s vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don’t want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy.

I was thinking about honour. It’s a thing that changes doesn’t it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we’d laugh. There must have been...

You can’t ever tell what’s going to hurt people.

There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning...

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

It [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin...

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life…

For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

You know,” he added reflectively, “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral...

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.

It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.

We,Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned...

No one is ever holy without suffering.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the...

I suppose it’s something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.

You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

Do you want to change?” “It’s the only evidence of life.

…any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find...

Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I’m sure he can’t be very nice.”I don’t think he is,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t know that I like nice people

Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months...