Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.
And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?
But I do like the idea of household gods--shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?I hope they believe in something, said Elspeth. 'Imagaine believing in not...
So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community....
My Botswana books are positive, and I've never really sought to deny that. They are positive. They present a very positive picture of the country. And I think that that is perfectly defensible given t...
You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.
What else do you need in life, Mma? You have a fine husband—which is one of the most important things that anybody can have.
The size of one’s house might bear a relationship to the size of one’s opinion of oneself, but it had nothing to do with one’s real worth.
Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do yo...
So, in less elevated circles, we might toss a coin as to whether or not to go to a party, decide to go, and there meet the person whom we are to marry and spend our lives with. And if that person came...
She's sociopathic. She will have no moral compunction in doing whatever is in her interests. It's as simple as that.
She had, Emma decided, a very particular beauty about her, a quality that required more than the possession of conventionally attractive features. Good looks could be a cliché, which meant that those...
I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I...
I suppose that's the way affairs come to an end. Somebody grabs a fork and stabs the other in the hand. And that's it
He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret--how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later...
But we are all fortunate in one way or another. The task for most of us is to identify in what way that is, would you not agree?
Back home in Arbroath, they had thought that she was just a girl–she had heard one of her male relatives say just that–and that somebody who was just a girl had nothing really important to say about a...
Artists were allowed to do that - to look, to gaze at others and try to find out what it was that they were feeling - but we, who were not artists, were not. If one looked too hard that would be consi...
Charming people, when not actively shooting one another, a friend had once said, which was so unkind, but, like so many unkind comments, had a grain of truth in it. They shoot one another and had bee...
Of day it was or how we were feeling, they were