The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things--that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully al...
The doctor drummed the fingers of his left hand on the edge of the table, a strange gesture which suggested, Isabel thought, an impatient temperment. Perhaps he had been obliged to listen too long to...
The difficulty, of course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little difference. At the end of the day,a man was no match for a woman.... The only thing to do was to try to avoid s...
The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us.
The Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind. They d...
That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are.
Such was human progress; and to think that they were even talking now about filing papers in something called the Cloud. She was not sure how good an idea that would be in a country like Botswana, whe...
Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were
She wouldn't disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things. Maybe not, mused Maggie. If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the m...
She smiled at the memory. Her father, her dearest daddy, had become late many years ago now, but she still thought of him every day. Now she remembered his words about ‘the look’ and reminded herself...
She saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what c...
She meant it, and as she spoke, she thought how strange it was that we so very rarely said complimentary things to our friends, and how easy it was to do so, and how it made the world seem a less hars...
She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses...
She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved e...
She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.
She did not have strong views on politics. She did not like the confrontational nature of much political discussion; why could people not argue politely, she wondered, taking into account the views of...
Perhaps they could get married in heaven, if he left it too late. That would certainly be cheaper.
People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be wea...
Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to...
Offering a lady a chair was one way of showing that this work was appreciated, and that strength and brute force—at which men generally tended to excel—was not the only thing that counted. Respect for...