103 Quotes by Anita Brookner

[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

The company of their own sex, Edith reflected, was what drove many women into marriage.

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.

...but you’ve been a fool. Some women take advantage. Once they’re married, and they’ve got a good husband, they think they can do what they like. And if they take him for granted-” she paused significantly- “they just don’t bother anymore.

I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need never to admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them.

They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.