"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."

“The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

“The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.”

“Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.”

“He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.”

“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”