“Lucky in work, unlucky in love.”

“Before Octavia was born, I used to think that love bore some relation to merit and to beauty, but now I saw that this was not so.”

“[on John Cowper Powys]...there is an indistinct photograph of the great man himself, gazing into the misty cleft of a mountain range, wearing what could be an old rug, or an old cardigan. He looks like a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.”

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible.”

“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?”

“I actually remember feeling delight, at two o'clock in the morning, when the baby woke for his feed, because I so longed to have another look at him.”

“I don't see how you can go too far, in the right direction”