“The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself.”

I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.

Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Thank goodness my education was neglected.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

I am worn to a raveling.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is ‘soporific’.

I fear that we shall be obliged to leave this pudding

When gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester.

A gentleman had a favourite cat whom he taught to sit at the dinner table where it behaved very well. He was in the habit of putting any scraps he left onto the cat’s plate.

I do so hate finishing books. I would like to go on with them for years.

For quiet, solitary and observant children create their own world and live in it, nourishing their imaginations on the material at hand.

Once upon a time there were three kittens, and their names were Mitten, Tom Kitten, and Moppet. They had dear little fur coats of their own; and they tumbled about the doorstep and played in the dust.

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s hand, holding the tea-cup, was very very brown, and very very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap, there were HAIRPINS sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.

People want to know about the details of politicians, what they like doing in their spare time, about their families. I think that’s human.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.

Things are changing at such a rate that you really can’t get too familiar with anything that you own in relation to what sort of functionality it has in your life.

Your body must become familiar with its death – in all its possible forms and degrees – as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life.

This seems quite good, a bit familiar.’ Then I realise … It’s one of my movies. It’s a pretty odd feeling.