Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.
To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.
Few pretty and privileged young women really understand the essential injustice of biology...For most of her life as a woman, the rules were perfectly clear cut: other women were the enemy, and all lo...
The idea that any of their offspring could possibly be accused of involvement in criminal activities caused deep offence, even to parents who believed that property was theft.
But this city is a world of its own, a country within a country. People are used to taking the old and making it news; and used, too, to taking the new and making it old. Every glass of water from its...
It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.
I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language h...
Hatred bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Polly was all too aware that much of her time on holiday would be spent doing the laundry and the cooking and the child-care and all the other chores that back in London would be shared with her clean...
All age is a kind of tiredness, I think. When you’re young, the lines never show. Every morning you wake unmarked, wiped clear by sleep. One day, though, you see lines that itch, as though some crumb...
All paradises are there to be expelled from.
If you read fairy tales carefully, you’ll notice they are mostly about people who aren’t heroes. They don’t have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten u...
I’ve noticed that whenever institutions claim to be confident of anything it means the complete opposite.
Just about the worst thing an artist can do is to try and be a nice person.
I am a Jewish mother. My dying words will be, “Put a jumper on
You know the only rule you need to know to get on in this country? ‘Never complain, never explain.
Very happy or unhappy, people disappear.
That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.
Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom
The sudden acquisition of power does not go to the head, but to the groin. In some, it promotes lust; in others, supplants it. Those on whom its effect is purely cerebral may indeed be counted as fort...
