“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.”

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.

What a good thing there is no marriage or giving in marriage in the after-life; it will certainly help to smooth things out.

I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.

Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? . . . I expect it will be sit and wait.

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.

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

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.

People are too durable, that’s their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long.

Life is short, so I am one of those people – and luckily my girlfriend is too – who wants to live everywhere. I don’t know how long I’ll be there, but I like it right now.

Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren’t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?

People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.

I learned long ago that when change comes, you gotta slow down and take note of it. In the midst of that change is all the possibility in the world.

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

When you’ve been at it for as long as we have, you go through fallow periods and blooming ones, and you know when you’re on a roll and you learn how to keep it rolling for as long as you can.

You’ve got to make haste while it’s still light of day. My godmother used to say, I don’t want to rust out, I just want to work out. If you stand still long enough, people will throw dirt on you.