Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.