Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.
Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.
I think you learn more if you’re laughing at the same time.
Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.
I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted – and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.
Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)
I did not throw ‘The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation’ at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.
She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)!
Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.
I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did.
I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.
It is my belief that with two such men in the household and no way to meet others, Emily (Bronte)had to make Heathcliff up out of thin air! And what a fine job she did. Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.
What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.
Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I’ll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He’d have to—you’d not grant anyone else something you can’t have for yourself—no love, no kindness, no respect!
Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw – especially when you are young.
Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of – hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.
I never met a man half so true as a dog. Treat a dog right, and he’ll treat you right. He’ll keep you company, be your friend, and never ask you no questions. Cats is different, but I never held that against ’em.
He’s got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he’s not disagreeable about it. He’s too sure he’s right to bother being disagreeable.
Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.
But the truth is that I’m gloomy – gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don’t know whether to feel flattered or hunted.