Quotes from Barbara Vine

Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could.

Is there any sadder sight than a burnt out library?

But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was.

Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.

Life is too short to be so circumspect.

By the age I was then I ought to know the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight.

Events in his own past he never thought of as evil but rather as mistaken, immensely regrettable, brought about by fear and greed.

Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.

A disturbing experience it had been, exciting and confusing.

We are all mad at three in the morning

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. I am I and you are you. And if we find each other that's beautiful, if not, it can't be helped.

Games were being played, that was all, and games of which he was largely ignorant and wished to remain so.

I think life's too long to do anything that we know is wrong before we begin.

You do not put off things because they threaten you, because you are afraid; It was a rule of life.

Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.

Our children when young are a part of ourselves, but when they grow up, they are just other people. —A PAPER LANDSCAPE

Having someone else in the house, a large, clever, overbearing yet indifferent presence, mitigates loneliness not at all.

That family's mutual love had not usually found its expression in outward show. In other words, there had not been embraces. The twins, for instance, did not kiss each other, though the women pecked the air around each other's faces. It

I only have love affairs with a notebook.