But gratitude can be the very devil sometimes, particularly if you have to be grateful for services you’d rather be without.
Miss Bingley was particularly anxious at the time not to leave the capital. Her pursuit of a widowed peer of great wealth was entering a most hopeful phase. Admittedly without his peerage and his mone...
Were. It was as pointlessly presumptuous to try to change them as it was impertinent to pity them.
Reinforced my initial prejudice against what, with the intolerance of youth, I thought of as a type.
[Mr. Collins] began by stating that he could find no words to express his shock and abhorrence, and then proceeded to find a great number, few of them appropriate and none of them helpful.
They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their...
The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely...
The emotion he felt towards her was as mysterious as it was irrational. He needed to understand it, to define its nature, to analyse what he knew was beyond analysis. But some things now he did know,...
Perfect fear casteth out love, thought Gabriel. The aphorism pleased him.
He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and a self-indulgent exploration, a means of making sense of the past years, part catharsis, part c...
Charlotte had not been the eldest of a large family without acquiring some skill in the management of male delinquencies and her method with her husband was ingenious. She consistently congratulated h...
Bereavement is like a serious illness. One dies or one survives, and the medicine is time, not a change of scene.
Ridiculous,
We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed.
There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their p...
The young seldom lie convincingly. They haven’t had time to practise like the rest of us.
The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead.
The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.
The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.
The apparent suicide, the certified natural death, the brutal murder - there was a cord which connected them. Its strength might be tenuous and its path convoluted, but when he had traced it, it would...