“ I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry. Iris Murdoch
“ All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair. Leo Tolstoy
“ She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married… E.M. Forster
“ That porch is a happy-looking place, and my father - burdened, stoop-shouldered, cadaverously thin - doesn't seem to belong on it. Margaret Peterson Haddix
“ He wanted to be a universal man . . . and I suppose that isn't possible now. He belongs in fifteenth-century Italy. This age doesn't suit him. Iris Murdoch
“ If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a… Jodi Picoult
“ The unfortunate 8075 hadn't survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-pl… A. Ashley Straker
