The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not yet thinned out.
A man’s greatest fear from a woman is that she will laugh at him; a woman’s fear is that a man will kill her.
Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...
There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.
I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.
Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey’s end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.
And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn’t seem to be any moral place for flesh.
Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations.
You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.
There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.
I’ve always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
I used to be a reasonably careless and adventurous person before I had children; now I am morbidly obsessed by seat-belts and constantly afraid that low-flying aircraft will drop on my children’s school.
On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can’t win.
London, how could one ever be tired of it?
Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.
England’s not a bad country? It’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286.
Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.