For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
So much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness floods right through me like being flooded over with warm glittering blue water, I can't believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna...
She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordin...
Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong wi...
Mas como era extraordinária aquela sala cheia de gente — ou melhor, de animais -, a olhar na mesma direcção, para outros animais mascarados e treinados para representar num palco, para animais coberto...
I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.Yes, said Kate. I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
Free women, said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even...
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your...
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning...
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formu...
Themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and a...
Yes, it’s because it’s one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are *equipped.* Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we -- we're just peasants. We don't u...
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Oh, yes, Alice did know that she forgot things, but not how badly, or how often. When her mind started to dazzle and to puzzle, frantically trying to lay hold of something stable, then she always at o...
I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?
But my poor Saul, there’s no help for you, you’re heading straight for it. What about all those marvelous people we know, aged about fifty or sixty? Well, there are a few of them…marvelous, mature, wi...
And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven kn...
Victim-eyes of impersonal tragedy, to be impersonal no longer.