I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
Martha Quest, who thought of herself as so adventurous, so free and unbounded—the fact was, even the idea of picking up a telephone and making herself known to a new person troubled her: she made excuses, she could not do it.
We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end.
Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Also, the rules of this particular game demanded that it was not enough to say: So and so disagrees with us, who are the possessors of evident truth. It had to also be said: So and so is evil, corrupt, sexually depraved, and so on.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.
Then he said, ‘Well, Matty, we don't seem to go together at all, do we. I'm simply not broadminded enough for your Jews and your niggers.
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. —BARON CORVO.
I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I've seen it over and over again.
We are being punished, that's all. What for? he demanded, already on guard because there was a tone in her voice he hated. For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be.
Yes, my child, you must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn't matter what you read at first, later you'll learn discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.
When she returned to the office, she found that Mr Jasper Cohen had gone abruptly on holiday. His son had been killed in Spain—he had been shot, near Madrid, rather more than a year before; a friend of his had written, on returning safe to England, to tell his father so.
That a work of the imagination has to be really about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
Sitting there I had a vision of the world with nations, systems, economic blocks, hardening and consolidating; a world where it would become increasingly ludicrous even to talk about freedom, or the individual conscience.
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Do you really think it's right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?' 'I'm earning her a lot of money.' 'I was talking about sex,' said Paul, and Willi said: 'I don't know what you mean.' He didn't. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex this way; far less honest.
The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.
I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for.
We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.
This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.
If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.
Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Yes, it's because it's one thing to think poor things and another to allow that African politics could have any resemblance at all to English politics—even such a long time ago.
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.
We all of us seem to have this belief that things are going to get better. Why should they? Sometimes I think we're moving into a new ice age of tyranny and terror, why not? Who's to stop it—us?
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
It is not too much to say that when the word blood is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart.
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Poor economies breed tyrannies.
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
For she is remembering Paul's saying: There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
To my mind the whole push and thrust and development of the world is towards the more complex, the flexible, the open-minded, the ability to entertain many ideas, sometimes contradictory ones, in one's mind at the same time.
I never stopped reading.
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
