Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn’t changed: you have.
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it’s for a half-second, ‘Perhaps this is THE man.
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You’re a normal human being. What right have you to that?
As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.
Yes, it’s because it’s one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics – even such a long time ago.
For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not.
The point is, it seems to me that my mind is a mass of totally contradictory attitudes about everything.’ ‘Everyone’s mind is a mass of contradictory attitudes. Why should it matter?’ ‘It should matter to us, surely?
He had decided not to be angry: it was killing him.
If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.
A writer is the conscience of the world.
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.