The Tiger in the Smoke

Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world.

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade,

Waiting is one of the great arts.

Mourning is not forgetting,’ he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. ‘It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.

When Uncle Hubert spoke of a fellow human being as poor, he meant to convey that either by accident or intention they had done something wrong.

Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.

If only it were true. If only anyone could tell anybody else anything. If only one could know by being told.

The soul is one's own affair from the beginning to the end. What is the soul? When I was a child I thought it was a little ghostly bean, kidney-shaped. I don't know why. Now I think of it as the man I am with when I am alone.

The fat man, taken by surprise, was very hurt. "Search me, Missus." "I might if I had the time. Her bright eyes, small and dark as his own, took in his great bulk with wicked amusement. "What are you carrying about with you? The dome of St Paul's?" "Ho! Who's talking, eh?" As the insult went home he forgot all caution. "Margot Fonteyn of the Convent Garden I suppose.

I love you. I really do. As I am now, with these last five years behind me, I am a person who is quite terribly in love with you and will always be – or so I think now, today, in this taxi.

Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place.

He asked so little of life that its frugal bounty amazed and delighted him.

Avril raised his fine head. 'Yes,' he said. 'My poor Margaret.' His face changed only for an instant. The grief upon it appeared and passed like the shadow of a leaf in the wind, but its intensity was so great that Luke, who was still a young man, was dismayed to learn that it could exist.

When you go to her house, look round you. You'll find it full of knick-knacks, every single one of which has been treasured by someone.' He blinked and, lowering his head, looked at Picot with wide serious eyes. 'Whenever I see them they look to me like petrified morsels hacked out of living pain,' he said gravely.