“By the craggy hill-side,Through the mosses bare,They have planted thorn-treesFor pleasure here and there.If any man so daringAs dig them up in spite,He shall find their sharpest thornsIn his bed at night.”

“Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.”

“Round the world and home again, that's the sailor's way!”

“When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.”

“But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.”

“I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.”

“What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.”