“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'--William Boot”

“Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.”

“The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly-- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.”

“Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”

“So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.”

“Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.”

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.”