“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”

“At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.”

“All horsepower corrupts.”

“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.”

“No, whoever was out there didn't want to take her in. But his sights were on her, gun sights, steady. Clear. She stared into them, and with a mocking smile, mouthed the words, I dare you!" (Cassie Sinclair)***He smiled at the challenge. One day, she just might dare him too far, but he doubted it would be a bullet he'd penetrate her with. (Unknown Breed)”

“I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday”

“Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers”