“Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

“An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The pattern on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk... The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone...”

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.”

“I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.”

“Men and women who have never lived make finer captives on the printed page, or if they have lived, and are historical, then the very knowledge that they belong to a past we have not known ourselves induces fancy.”

“He stole horses' you'll say to yourself, 'and he didn't care for women; and but for my pride I'd have been with him now.”

“The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. ("The Pool”