Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.
It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Better Counsel comes overnight.
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
I never stopped reading.
I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.
I’ll be pleased when I’m dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
I’m sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what’s going on in the world.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Small things amuse small minds.
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
I’m very unhappy when I’m not writing.