8 Quotes by Barbara Vine

He began to walk back. The crowd had cleared a little, to swell again no doubt in a minute or two when the planeload arriving from Rome came through. He could make out several dark-skinned people, men and women of African, West Indian, and Indian origin. Adam had not always been a racist, but he was one now. He thought how remarkable it was that these people could afford to travel around Europe.

Why do you always wear black?”She delighted me with her answer, the correct, the only, answer. “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.

Is there any sadder sight than a burnt out library?

Lean on me,” someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there’s no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.

Ivo had grown more and more like one of those characters in his books who are always groaning about their miserable fate in helplessly loving someone unworthy of their love. Maugham never says much about what that’s like for the poor old unworthy object. I could have told him. It’s not exactly uplifting for the self-image.

His books distracted him for a while. They were like the aspirins you take when you’ve got a headache. They kill the pain for two hours and then it comes back.

Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.

Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to “love.” Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.