Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

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.

For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged.

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.