Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown.
Love's elastic. It's not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn't take away. So there's no need to worry about that.
Louise Colet was a proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.
Listen to them again: ‘I love you.’ Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguo...
Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beg...
Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.
In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.
If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours.
I want a more difficult life, that's all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I...
I don’t want you to be a woman of mystery. I think I’d hate it. Either it’s just a façade, a game, a technique for ensnaring men, or else the woman of mystery is a mystery even to herself, and that’s...
How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the bo...
History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and i...
He took his own life is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have...
Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave...
For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and...
First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life...