“Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.”

“... A wet night. They are going home together under an umbrella. They stop on the door to press their wet cheeks together.”

“We might be fifty, we might be five,So snug, so compact, so wise are we!Under the kitchen-table legMy knee is pressing against his knee.”

“Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.”

“The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has become the secret friend of their author.”

“When we reached home your cheeks were like roses, and your eyes were shining like stars, and you tried to tell Mummy so much in one breath that I thought you would burst.”

“There! it had come ― the moment ― the geste! And although I was so ready, it caught me; it tumbled me over; I was simply overwhelmed. And the physical feeling was so curious, so particular. It was as if all of me, except my head and arms, all of me that was under the table, had simply dissolved, melted, turned into water. Just my head remained and two stick of arms pressing on to the table. But, ah! the agony of that moment! How can I describe it? I didn’t think of anything. I didn’t even cry out to myself. Just for one moment I was not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony.Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: "Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely unconscious! I hadn’t a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was swept off my feet! I didn’t even try, in the dimmest way, to put it down!" And up I puffed and puffed, blowing off finally with: "After all I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling so.. purely.”