Quotes from Olivia Manning

Don't be silly, you only catch what you fear to catch", and, fearing nothing, he saw himself immune.

Every marriage was imperfect and the destroying agents, the imperfections, were there, unseen, from the start.

A man is made by his circumstances", said Guy. "If you want to change him, you must change his circumstances.

A mist lay on the sea, very white but thinning here and there so the water beneath could be seen looking like green milk.

This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy.

He had only to arrive to take a step away from her.

They have,' she said, 'the uniformity of their insecurity.

Was there any more repellent sight, Harriet wondered, than a silly, self-centred, greedy woman clad in the skin of a beast so much more splendid than herself?

She's just a typical bourgeois reactionary.' 'You mean, her prejudices are different from yours.

Harriet was reminded of Doamna Flöhr's claim that the exclusiveness of the Jews was the exclusiveness of the excluded.

an age of chivalry as outmoded as honour, as obsolete as truth.

was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. Good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.

The trouble with prejudice is, there's usually a reason for it,' but she now knew better than to say this to Guy.

Oh, come, darling,' Guy protested, 'I didn't want to marry Sophie, but one has to be polite.

A wheel moved slowly, bearing up into the sky empty carriages shaped like boats.

They left the park by a side gate where a statue of a disgraced politician stood with its head hidden in a linen bag.

The Pringles had been married less than a week. Though she would have claimed to know about him everything there was to be known, she was now beginning to wonder if she really knew anything.

She decided he might be an easy acquaintance, but would not be easy to know.

Looking at Guy, Harriet laughed and said: 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity'.

War meant a perpetual postponement of life, yet one did not cease to grow old.

He loves to tell that old story of the don who was granted an interview with Napoleon. "No doubt a remarkable fellow," said the don afterwards, "but anyone can see he's not a Cambridge man.

If Guy had for her the virtue of permanence, she might have the same virtue for him. To have one thing permanent in life as they knew it was as much as they could expect.

Together they owned the large, flamboyant Doctor Beltado. They might ignore him, they might even despise him, but no one else was going to get him.

If one could not bear the memory of the dead, then they must be shut out of memory. There was no other action anyone could take against the bafflement of grief.