It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

• The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
• Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.
• Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.
• Hate is the consequence of fear we fear something before we hate it a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
• Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
• The dread of lonliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
• There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
• As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
• The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food.
• The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.