27 quotes found
Writer · British · 1931–2023
British writer (1931–2023)
“guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine”
“I am an ordinary person but carried to extremes.”
“There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”
“There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it.”
“Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually”
“So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got.”
“Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and...”
“For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.”
“She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.”
“Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.”
“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”
“We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would...”
“Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would ...”
“Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do...”
“Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.”
“Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.”
“Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth left to itself it sweeps in like the tide.”
“You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face the friends the health and the children you have earned.”
“If you put a woman in a man's position she will be more efficient but no more kind.”