To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
Death is only a small interruption.
When you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way.
The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.
I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow and anger – adequately.
I am 46, and have been for some time past.
I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can’t rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.
For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
You can never betray the people who are dead.
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can’t answer slurs, but I’m here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn’t.
It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.