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.
Josephine TeyThe 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.
Josephine TeyA thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.
Josephine TeyThat 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.
Josephine Tey