There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I ….

Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart..

I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous..

The end of exile is the end of being..

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother p….

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters..

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh….

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, ….

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence..

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, sudd….

Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known th….

I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away f….

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations..

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she on….

ordered me a sky from a florist.

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people..

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride..

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all..

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive..

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody..

Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why? Because, she said. You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty loo….