Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground -- or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.