... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

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

... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

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.