She reached her doorstep. The key turned sweetly in the lock. That was the kind of thing one remembered about a house: not the size of the rooms or the color of the walls, but the feel of the door-handles and light-switches, the shape and texture of the banister-rail under one’s palm; minute tactual intimacies, whose resumption was the essence of coming home.

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

This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day’s pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two pairs of eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.

Clem Miniver: She was a good cook, as good cooks go. And as good cooks go, she went.

One is what one remembers: no more, no less.

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

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.

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.

It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch.

And I am a mockery, who was God before.