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.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.

The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.