It's all in the mind, you know.

My Father had a profound influence on me, he was a lunatic.

You couldn't enclose people in institutions or hospitals or almshouses in the way the Victorians managed to do. India was too big. Seeing the suffering people was terrible, but I think I was more distraught at the needless cruelty to so many animals.

Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart. The kidneys, the liver and the giblets too. And every other part.

The lunacy continues and has every chance of becoming a way of life unless we stop it soon. Men are getting so used to wars that the psychiatric wing of the RAMC are planning how to break the news to the men when the war is over.

I have resigned from the human race. Look at the way we treat animals.

I had stopped going to church the moment I joined the Regiment. No more could my mother nag me into God's presence.

I'm Irish. We think sideways.

Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position) has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time, I have been working for her.

Never return to a doctor whose office plants have died. After five days in hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.

For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron hand. Then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string.

The experience of being in the Army changed my whole life; I never believed that an organization such as ours could ever go to war, leave alone win it. It was, as Yeats remarked of the Easter Rising, 'A terrible beauty.'

We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.

In the human race today, you came last.

And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.

Money couldn't buy friends, but you got a better class of enemy.

My father was a soldier, which meant that he was a warrior, which meant that he was important. My mother rode a horse and sang in the Governor-General's band, so that made her important as well.

The youngest member of this ageing community was ex-variety artiste, Patrick L. Balls. Fifty-nine now, he spent out his remaining years pulling a rope lift and bottling fruit. He had once whistled Ave Maria for Queen Victoria. She wasn't present at the time, but nevertheless that's who he was whistling it for.

The most difficult book I have ever read was a manual on the use of iron bangles by A.J. Thompson.