“Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.”
“If this word should turn out to be a 'Te moriturum saluto,' perhaps it will brighten the dark moments a little to think how you have meant to someone more than anything ever has or ever will. What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always.”
“Mother says that people like me just become intellectual old maids,' I told him.'I don't see why,' he protested.'Oh, well, it's probably true!' I said, rather sharply, for misery had as usual made me irritable. 'After the War there'll be no one for me to marry.''Not even me?' he asked very softly.'How do I know I shall want to marry you when that time comes?''You know you wouldn't be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.''That rather narrows the field of choice, doesn't it?''Well--do you need it to be so very wide?”
“She seemed to have waited so long to hear those words that for a moment the earth stood still, and the moon, the trees, the grotesque shadows across the heath, became in that instant transfixed in her memory. How shall I bear this exquisite happiness? It is too much: it will destroy me.”
“Could I write an autobiographical novel, I wonder? Can one make a book out of the very essence of one's self? Perhaps so, if one was left with one's gift stripped bare of all that made it worth having, and nothing else was left...”
“There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think--which is fundamentally a moral problem--must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.”
“At college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life.”