"‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. …"

"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermittent gloom."

"Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forge…"

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is to…"

"Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forev…"

"Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpet…"

"England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industria…"

"I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machine…"