“There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods-violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds.”

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it.

the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done

It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.

How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

Headlines twice the size of the events.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature.

Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.

Matters change and morals change; men remain.

The building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

Beginnings are always messy.

Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious – there was generally some reason for it.

Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

He might wish and wish and never get it – the beauty and the loving in the world!

We have known an emotion which is in every case the same in kind, if not in degree; an emotion precious and uplifting.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls.

The past is always with us, in the form of our photographs, which we feel as we might a rosary, wearing them smooth with the fingering of our eyes.

We are not that flash, me or the missus. In fact, we are quite low-maintenance.

Katy Perry still gets me every time. She’s very funny in person! We met at the Teen Choice Awards and she pulled my cheeks apart and told me how cute I was. My life was literally flashing before my eyes!

Thoughts on a tapestry. Colour or black and white. A brush, a pen, A flash of light. Ideas flowing soon, about to take flight.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

It’s funny because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.

It’s funny because what happens to me when I read a script, when something grabs hold of me, I start getting these flashes of people or places or things or images.

Like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed.