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...
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.
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...
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...
Oh, no, I'm not saying she isn't a nut -- she is -- but I've noticed before that sometimes someone like that behaves quite ordinarily with everybody, manages everything, you'd never think she was a nu...
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.
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...
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
There are people in the world all the time who know the professor said. But they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the trap. And then, for the ones who h...
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, How could you have believed that?...
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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...
Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.