Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them.

The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.

She saw every personal religion as a pair of intersecting circles. . . . Probably perfection is reached when the area of the two outer crescents, added together, is exactly equal to that of the leaf-shaped piece in the middle. On paper there must be some neat mathematical formula for arriving at this in life, none.

It's just as important to marry the right life as the right person.

Words were the only net to catch a mood, the only sure weapon against oblivion.

For to love, loveless, is a bitter pill:But to be loved, unloving, bitterer still.

It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.

It oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feelings, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation.

To be put down in this world, and given only eighty years to get to know it in, is like being let loose in the United States of America for the first time with a high-powered car and unlimited gasoline - but with a visa that is valid for only a week. It's agonizing, that's what it is.

Giving a party is like having a baby: its conception is more fun than its completion and once you have begun it, it is almost impossible to stop.

I can't abide cats myself, but of course we have to have one in the kitchen to deal with the mice. I insisted on getting a black one, because anything else shows the dirt so in London.