Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.