He was never quite certain what he thought about anything until he had tested his opinion for seaworthiness in the course of some polemical storm.
She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of get...
I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into somet...
I would have said that Eichmann was profoundly, egregiously stupid, and for me stupidity is not the same as having a low IQ. Here I rather agree with Kant, that stupidity is caused, not by brain failu...
We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.
You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffr...
Boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.
He would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him. You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.
You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex—that’s quite a thought, isn’t it?
Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother’s unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience...
I felt caught in a dilemma that was new to me then but which since has become horribly familiar: the trap of adult life, in which you are held, wriggling, powerless to act because you can see both sid...
He was a thoroughly bad hat, then, but that was the kind, of course, that nice women broke their hearts over.
Elinor was always firmly convinced of other people’s hypocrisy since she could not believe that they noticed less than she did.
All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn’t express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it—in other men’s words.
The privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia … [N]ow, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right … [to] behave badly if necessary, until [Preston] responded...
This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their...
They had caught a glimpse of themselves in a mirror, a mirror placed at a turning point where they had expected to see daylight and freedom, and though each of them, individually, was far from believi...
His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.
Independent working girls out in the world, in pursuit of the kind of adventure that would strengthen, not deplete, us, as we would then be armed with experience.