“[N]obody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.”

“The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass.”

“Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”

“It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.”

“I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.”

“Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other, but it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”

“For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.”