The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.
For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.
Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.
The clown may be the source of mirth, but – who shall make the clown laugh?
There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we’d lived in different rooms.
I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.
Just because we’re sisters under the skin doesn’t mean we’ve got much in common.
That is what I’m looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world.
The kind of power mothers have is enormous.
Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?
The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
I haven’t changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
It’s every woman’s tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we’ve known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.
Women’s sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.