“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

“In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.”

“Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?”

“Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.”

“The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. (The change-ringer's) passion - and it is a passion - finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.”

“How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.”

“A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world. ”