For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

It was tempting to take refuge in feelings of British superiority, although I disliked myself for it and hoped it didn't show.

The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language.

It was my first dead body and I waited for the appropriate feelings. I didn't know what feelings to expect, which was worse than realising that I had none.

What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.

I drank through the buzz of befuddlement into perfect clarity and out again into the blissful confusion of true intoxication.

You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.

It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down—It was not Night, for all the BellsPut out their Tongues, for Noon.

There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

The Loire Valley is grossly underestimated. The prices are fair, and the wines are real.

What then in love can woman do? If we grow fond they shun us. And when we fly them, they pursue: But leave us when they've won us.

The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity.

All places are filled with fools. [Lat., Stultorum plenea sunt omnia.]

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

It seems to me that romantic comedies used to be about falling in love, but in recent years they've really become just comedies where the love story is only there as a spine to hang the jokes on.