Quotes from Anita Brookner

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.