Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
Lucky in work, unlucky in love.
Doing a jigsaw was not an intelligence test, or a personality assesment programme; it was a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie.
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.
World War II put feminism on hold for a long time; the men went away to fight, a lot of women in those years got jobs both in teaching and in factories – at all social levels – which they enjoyed very much. A lot of them were quite happy during the war.
How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.
The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.
Why can’t people be both flexible and efficient?
The women are always vixens or monsters. They can’t just be normal people in the book.
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.
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn’t have bothered to write them.
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.