83 Quotes by Claire Tomalin

Mary Wollstonecraft was the first person to apply the phrase 'legal prostitution' to marriage.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot

The most striking aspect of Jane's adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others ... They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart'. They are also, perhaps, the letters of someone who doesn't dare open her heart, for fear of what she might find there.

She was the sort of person whose mood preceded her into the room whenever she arrived, an extra presence that could not be ignored.

A whim did not provide a living.

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.