"The constant happiness is curiosity."

"The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming."

"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."

"Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later."

"Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?"

"She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements."

"He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life."

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."

"I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window."

"People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum."

"Life would be grand if it weren't for the people."

"They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life."

"She would live now, not read."

"Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

"My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information."

"There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever."

"What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it"."

"Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person."

"You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never."

"We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time."

"Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?"

"What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."

"He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into."

"And now such a warm commotion, such busy love."

"Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class."

"There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done."

"It’s just life. You can’t beat life."

"I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it."

"There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive."

"I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same."

"The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair."

"I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves."

"Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."

"Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places"

"Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently."

"She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort."

"People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one"

"And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?"

"It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust."

"And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently."

"Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?"

"One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning."

"Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead."

"....Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…"

"One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them."

"For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?"

"None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade."