I've forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I've forgotten them, and now I'm talking to you without them.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.

Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself.

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.