“How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.”

I realised that one might love him secretly with no hope of encouragement, which can be very enjoyable for the young or inexperienced.

Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.

The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one’s mind.

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that’s all.

I stretched out my hand towards the little bookshelf where I kept cookery and devotional books, the most comfortable bedside reading.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.

You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.

I imagine the proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth can be applied to writing as well as anything else. The poetical or literary broth is better cooked by one person.

Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd.

in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

To give a price to an artwork, no matter how high or low, is always absurd. It’s not something that can be measured by money or by certain numbers.

When I was a kid, I read comics. But when I saw how funny it was, and how wonderfully absurd, I said, “You know, I gotta do this.”

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.

We must keep our freedom of mind, and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hardhearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian.