Quotes from Penelope Fitzgerald

She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.

Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment.

Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.

Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention.

There isn't one kind of happiness, there's all kinds. Decision is torment for anyone with imagination. When you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.

Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.' 'I don't see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can't be called a success.

Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness.

Understanding makes the mind lazy.

She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

There's two ways to be selfish. You can think too much about yourself, or you can think too little about others. You're selfish both ways.

It was defeat, but defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired.

All distances are the same to those who don't meet.

What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.

More than that, I believe that the grass is green because green is restful to the human eye, that the sky is blue to give us an idea of the infinite. And that blood is red so that murder will be more easily detected and criminals will be brought to justice. Yes, and I believe that I shall live forever, but I shall live without reason.

Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once.

But we weren't meant to live alone,' said Frank. 'Life makes its own corrections.

If there's even one person who might be hurt by a decision, you should never make it.

Old age is not the same thing as historical interest,' he said. 'Otherwise we should both of us be more interesting than we are.

human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one.

Richard was the kind of man who has two clean handkerchiefs on him at half past three in the morning.

Her courage, after all, was only a determination to survive. The

She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.

I enjoy very little leisure in the evenings. But don't misunderstand me, I find a good book at my bedside of incalculable value. When I eventually retire I've no sooner read a few pages than I'm overwhelmed with sleep.