Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial games could be played.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.

we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.