I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
Family life itself that safest most traditional most approved of female choices is not a sanctuary: It is perpetually a dangerous place.
Novels since the birth of the genre have been full of rejected seduced and abandoned maidens whose proper fate is to die...
I actually remember feeling delight at two o'clock in the morning when the baby woke for his feed because I so longed to have another look at him.
There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery short of a new major play by Shakespeare.
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
The rare pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
It is to be doubted whether anybody who said good-bye to Bert had any faith or interest whatsoever in the life everlasting. This life had some of them thought been quite bad enough.
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition which I admire than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
How unjust life is to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.
If I knew what the meanings of my books were I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?
You have to be careful what you imagine because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
The middle years caught between children and parents free of neither: the past stretches back too densely it is too thickly populated the future has not yet thinned out.
Nothing succeeds they say like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.
Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.
Happiness is for those who can live in a warm climate.
Poverty therefore was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor in terms of those who were richer.
Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled forever to try and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
London how could one ever be tired of it?
England's not a bad country? It's just a mean cold ugly divided tired clapped-out post-imperial post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286
When nothing is sure everything is possible.
A man's greatest fear from a woman is that she will laugh at him; a woman's fear is that a man will kill her.
Nothing fails like failure
What foolsmiddle-classgirls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E M Forster.
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through unknown to all.
I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.
The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.
Scenery can be a violent stimulant.