That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.

You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

The worst of pushing horrible things down into one's subconscious is that when they pop up again they are as fresh as if they had been in a refrigerator. You haven't allowed time to get at them to-to mould them over a little.

If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.

It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.