A dog sees no point in dwelling on things that have happened; the important thing is that they are not happening now. In that respect, they have something to teach us: we so often feel that then is no...
The real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain...
I heard him say that he knew that he had been very stupid and that he would not be stupid again. Those were his very words, Mma, and I wrote them down on a piece of paper which we can keep in the offi...
. . there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn't. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home ad...
Ако човек, изчаквайки в нещо като предверие момента на своето раждане, можеше да си избере националността, не би ли било доста изкусително да поискаш да се родиш като италианец?
You, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher – bless her – a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox. Domenica looked puzzled. Oh? Angus smiled. Yes. Then I sto...
You did not look for a winner who would take everything; you found a way of allowing people to save face; you found a way of healing rather than imposing.
The fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives.
When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of u...
When meeting for lunch somebody one’s uncomfortable with, it’s important to have somewhere to look, don’t you agree?
Von Igelfeld was not sure. He remembered reading that Hume believed that our minds vibrated in sympathy, and that this ability – to vibrate in unison with one another – was the origin of the ethical i...
They'll go to jail' said the Captain. 'And they'll stay there until Christmas. Then, if they promise to give up piracy and take an honest job somewhere, they may be allowed to go free.
There’s a poem about onions, she said. It’s about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.
There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.
The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunk...
That’s precisely what I’m saying: in order to become better people, we must practise, Isabel said.
Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.
Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which...
Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar, and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the...
Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday w...