Thackeray is everybody's past - is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed forever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at once the hundred ghosts of oneself.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.

So in the heart, When, fading slowly down the past, Fond memories depart, And each that leaves it seems the last; Long after all the rest are flown, Returns a …

Near the lake where drooped the willow, Long time ago!

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.