On one thing professionals and amateurs agree: mothers can't win.

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person.

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember. ... By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.