[M]rs. Miniver was beginning to feel more than a little weary of exchanging ideas (especially political ones) and of hearing other people exchange theirs. It’s all very well, she reflected, when the ideas have had...

…[F]ireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had...

For really it was the refinement of civilized cruelty, this spick, span, and ingenious affair of shining leather and gleaming steel, which hoisted you and tilted you and fitted reassuringly into the small of your...

…[Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

That’s what any decent mind ought to do for its owner when she lets it off the leash – just go bounding away into the long grass and bring back a really profound thought, laying...

…[T]he mechanics of life should never be allowed to interfere with living.

It oughtn’t to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our...

…[A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.

A single person is a manageable entity, whom you can either make friends with or leave alone. But half of a married couple is not exactly a whole human being: if the marriage is successful...

The fact that we are now crusaders needn’t blind us to the fact that for a very long time we have been, as Badger would say, echidnas. I can think of a hundred ways already...

Left wing…Right wing…it’s so limited; why doesn’t it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?