Has he not got a wife back wherever he comes from? Is there no wife to say, ‘You must not go off and visit library ladies’?
Dieting was cruel; it was an abuse of human rights. Yes, that's what it was, and she should not allow herself to be manipulated in this way. She stopped herself. Thinking like that was nothing more th...
Contemplating this vast human suffering, you might be tempted to shrug your shoulders, but you could not.
But we all waste opportunities,’ said Domenica. Every single one of us. Every young person does it. It’s because we think we have so much time, and then, when we realise that our time is finite, it’s...
But she realised that this was what anxiety was like—it knew no rhyme or reason; just as a fear of the dark cannot be assuaged by the pointing out that there was nothing there, anxiety could be withou...
But shall we inspect what we see beyond? he went on. Please, after you… Elspeth thought: I am so fortunate. I am married to a man who says Please, after you. How fortunate is that? And she thought of...
Boys, men, she said. They're all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and they're all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.
Angus thought about this. She was right. That was why our national conversation was so bad. Courtesy had been abandoned in favour of the put-down, the attack, the calculated sound bite. What sort of n...
When she had those dreams at night, he was there, as if he had never died, although she knew, even in the dream, that he had. One day she would join him, she knew, whatever people said about how we ca...
There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.
The shoes themselves were light green, with lowish heels (which were very important for comfort and walking; high heels were always a temptation, but, like all temptations, one paid for them later).
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open.
Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawki...
People’s lives are delicate; you cannot interfere with them without running the risk of changing them profoundly. A chance remark, a careless involvement, may make the difference between a life of hap...
Now constipation was quite a different matter...It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and s...
Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.
Most of us are quite selfish when it comes to our children, you know. We want things from them: love, the satisfaction of seeing them do well, and so on. Plenty of parents don't think just of their ch...
It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.
Innocency: what a wonderful word, and different, in some indefinable way, from innocence. The difference, she thought, lay in the poetry.