Yes, but the artist?” said Nigel almost fiercely. “He’s different, you know he is. He’s driven by some compulsion: if he can’t do what he knows he has to do with his life he might...

I assure you, I’ve come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It’s true, don’t look so unbelieving. It...

Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades,Vision narrows, and the farSky-edge is gone with the sun.Be content with the small sparkOf the coal, the smellOf food, and the breathOf frost beyond the shut door....

…kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life...

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.

The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult.

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more…

Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white,...

The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it’s useless even to try

It was nearing 9 O’clock, and the fist duck was drawing down. Behind the trees, the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of the day had dropped, and the evening was...

Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.

I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the...

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.

At breakfast!’ said Louise in an awed voice. ‘A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.

By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.