Quotes from Anita Brookner

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

And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.

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 have been aware of a boredom, a restlessness, that no ordinary friendship can satisfy: only an extraordinary one.

This was somehow a day on which concentration would not be possible, a day on which words must give way to images

Secretly she envied those who went out and about, while she remained in the grip of her sentences.

People feel at home with low moral standards. It is scruples that put them off.

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

Hartmann had the ideas and Fibich did the worrying: it suited them both perfectly.

I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.

Kavgalar tatl?ya baÄŸlanabilir, ama baÅŸkalar?n? mahcup düÅŸürenler asla tümüyle unutulamaz.

The difficulty, as I saw it, was that she was trying to manage a public self whereas she was by nature a miniaturist who excelled at drawing into her field of activity nuances, intimations, unspoken thought, the most tenuous of personal statements. She was better at the glancing criticism than at spontaneous magnanimity

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish. It is the simplest thing in the world to decide what you want to do – or, rather, what you don't want to do – and just to act on that.

You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.

We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh; the sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

And my mother's afternoon escapes from the house that she could not quite consider her own were an indication that loneliness can be felt even in the most ideal of circumstances.

I reminded myself of someone, but someone I had not seen for a long time.

Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then.

Had she been more active, less reclusive, she would have gone out into the streets to lose herself in some sort of company, have made the pretext of buying an evening paper an opportunity to chat to the newsagent, but she rejected such stratagems, seeing them for what they were. It had been decreed that she was to be solitary, and somehow she had always known this. Once she had left her parents' house all friendships had seemed provisional; even marriage had not changed that.

She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt—had already adopted—a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment.

And the curious thing was that Dr Weis had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

It no longer seemed to me important that I had been duped. I was so tired of not apportioning blame that I could no longer see where it was due.

She hates and fears her husband, but only because he has not protected her, and she sees herself condemned to loneliness and exile. In this she is prescient. I see her, some years hence, a remittance woman, paid to live abroad, in such an hotel, in various Hotels du Lac, her beautiful face grown gaunt and scornful, her dog permanently under her arm. Her last weapon will be an unyielding snobbishness, which is already in evidence.