"'Oh, I see,' said Jenny. 'But you're just getting these men [New Age gurus] to help you all feel better. I thought when you talked about helping people you meant other people. You know, like the blind.' 'Isn't everybody blind, in one way or another?' asked Wendy."

"Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be."

"While he was climbing the litter-strewn steps his left ball gave a sharp twinge, on and off like a light-switch, then again after he had sat down. Nothing. Just one of the aches and pains that come and go. No significance."

"It’s quite a problem for retired people, I do see. All of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast. All those hours with nothing to stay sober for. Or nothing to naturally stay sober during, if you see what I…We used to laugh at Malcolm’s dad, the way he used to mark up the wireless programs in Radio Times in different-coloured pencils. Never caught him listening to any of them but it was an hour taken care of."

"There isn't another other sex."

"Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. Like sex. But the effects it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use."

"The rewards for being sane are not very many but knowing what's funny is one of them."

"Be glad you're fifty — and That you got there while things were nice, In a world worth looking at twice. So here's wishing you many more years, But not all that many. Cheers!"

"'What's that stuff they put in ships to keep them from going all over the place?' 'What? Oh … ballast?' 'That's right. People's sex drives are like ballast, they keep them steady. It sounds wrong, but they do.'"

"If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is."

"Then, because it was every cinematic doctor's exit line, the doctor added, "I'll see myself out.""

"[S]omething was being kept from him. But, short of scopolamine, hypnosis or wild horses, he knew he would never hear from her what it was."

"People who sound insincere all the time […] should not expect others to notice the difference when they try to sound insincere."

"As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution."

"He's taken to going off for hours at a time, wandering round those woods that lead off from the common apparently. Nothing there apart from trees and sexual maniacs."

"Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below?"

"Oaths fell from his mouth with a gentleness and sweetness which the blessings of other men cannot reach. His essays of Elia are full of this bright humour, this tender criticism. A ripple of tender laughter rips through them, just broke here and there by a sob."

"Surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made druken with wormwood, I conjre you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven."

"The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water."

"I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself."

"A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative."

"Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it ..."

"Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations."

"I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty."

"From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me."

"If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance."

"The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture."

"A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return."

"A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

"Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it."

"How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty."

"Books which are no books."

"Things in books' clothing."

"Books think for me."

"When I am not walking, I am reading;"

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds."

"A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature."

"It argues an insensibility."

"Presents, I often say, endear absents."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"It is good to love the unknown."

"Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door."

"Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength."

"I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair."

"Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune."

"I have no ear."

"A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game."

"I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!"

"Your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes."

"The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend."