But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are t… - Rebecca West

It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.

For one cannot serve the national spirit merely by getting a lump in the throat whenever one catches sight of the Union Jack, or by seeing red when a newspaper reports that some foreign power has acted aggressively towards England. These reactions bear the same relation to true love of country that a chance encounter between a man and a woman who meet in the street bears to a happy marriage.

So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed sharp and strong.: