“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

To be loved for what one is, that is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him; their own selves, their version of him.

It is not necessary for me always to premise, that I speak of the condition of the whole sex, leaving exceptions out of the question.

Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.

It is better to be an exception than to have expectations.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.