It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.