I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy’s Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin.

An author who waits for the right ‘mood’ will soon find that ‘moods’ get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens.

It seems delightfully incongruous,’ he wrote from Armentie‘res, ’that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour’s walk from the trenches.

A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.

You know you wouldn’t be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.

At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right – ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be – I believe that there is not – resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.

There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still.