Where the piano is, there is one’s treasure, as far as I am concerned... nothing, surely, is more delightful than sitting down at the piano on a summer day, and playing Chopin or Debussy while the natural sunlight drifts over one’s shoulders through the vines outside, creating a filigree of shadow in the printed page... a shifting pattern of ghostly leaf and blossom that dances to the mood of the music.

There are a thousand ‘greatest’ melodies, just as there are a thousand ‘greatest’ poems and a thousand ‘greatest’ pictures, because there are a thousand moods in the mind of man when a certain note rings with the most clarity – when a certain design is most sharply silhouetted against the changing curtain of his mind.

Some people find importance in the photographs of those titanic mushrooms of atomic poison which are periodically exploded over the world’s deserts; I find greater importance in one very small mushroom which mysteriously springs up in the shadow of the tool-shed.

On and on we wander in these pages – and we never reach the point because, happily, there is no point to reach.

Why do insurance companies, when they want to describe an act of God, invariably pick on something which sounds much more like an act of the Devil? One would think that God was exclusively concerned in making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts, and dry rot. They seem to forget that He also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom, and Siamese kittens. However, that is, perhaps, a diversion.

They came on one of April’s most brilliant days – a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon... a day when even the shadows were a melange of blue and orange and jade, like the shadows that poured from the tipsy brush of Monet.

To dig one’s own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore... especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.

A garden is a place for shaping a little world of your own according to your heart’s desire.

Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.