103 Quotes by Anita Brookner

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow and anger – adequately.

Parents are only good as parents at a certain stage of their children’s lives, she reflected.