"It (my book) is a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. (Maycock, A L, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. SPCK, London, 1938)"

"My meaning (dear Mother) is in these sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to God's glory."

"Do well and right, and let the world sink."

"Wouldst thou both eat thy cake and have it?"

"Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."

"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises."

"Like summer friends, Flies of estate and sunneshine."

"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie."

"Knowledge is folly unless grace guide it."

"To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise."

"It isn't class differences that keep people apart, it's thinking they bloody matter."

"Jimmie had said more than once that the upper class enjoyed the true freedom of not caring what anybody else thought about them. Like children perhaps. If that had a bearing, there might be a connection with the boyishness of such people noted by some outside observers, including Indians under the British Raj and later."

"[W]e're all trapped in a sort of conspiracy to pretend everybody's forgiven everybody else and nobody minds anything any more and we all know life's not like that but what can we do?"

"'Do you think that's altogether fair to him, to Jimmie, that is? I realize you've known him longer than I have.' 'Maybe, maybe not. You know, darling, I think you're sometimes a bit carried away by fairness.'"

"That stuff you read didn't condition you, you chose it because it was what you wanted to hear."

"[W]hat's the point of growing a beard if you're not going to be a little bit free and easy?"

"It had even occurred to him that sticking firmly to one girl could be unethically used to obtain exemption from the sometimes gruelling task of promiscuity."

"As soon as originality became important, the days of artistic merit or excellence were numbered."

"[B]eing a writer is much more important to the person, to the writer, than being anything else is to the person being it.[…] More than being a painter is to the painter or being a composer of music is to the composer, more than being anything else except maybe being a priest."

"You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish […]. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes."

"Nobody, however learned, however wise, can stand in the way of regress."

"Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats."

"'Shitty things are always simple. Same as great things. Patrick Standish, in conversation.'"