“Was sorrow, in the end, a private thing? A closed container? Something that, like a bucket of water, could be borne only on a single pair of shoulders?”

“We Three Kings of Leicester Square,Selling ladies’ underwear,So fantastic, no elastic,Only tuppence a pair.”

“I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.”

“Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own. Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.”

“The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates( “The finest this side Paradise,”) Brandwyn had written in his diary”

“I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.I'd have to think of something else.”

“Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition.”