Quotes from Anita Brookner

Her strong passions were compromised by the limited nature of her objectives. My mother had seen this at an early stage; it was to Dolly's advantage that she had never seen it at all. She needed a guide and had never found one; she needed a benevolent elder, who would watch over her and correct her.

Where I had once thought to say, Look at me, I must now turn the attention of others away from myself.

He had always shuddered at the cruelty of both stories, and in so doing had lost any simple beliefs, which had not, in any case, persisted after childhood, but having thought about the matter he preferred Pandora to Eve. Pandora let loose Discord, but at the bottom of the box discovered Hope. There was thus the relief of something saved, essential to any story, although when hope outlasted expectation the outcome was disillusion. That he was beginning to understand.

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties...

Art, he felt, let him down. For great paintings he felt only respect. Museum spaces beckoned him in, even welcomed him, but then left him on his own.

Quarrels can be made up; embarrassment can never quite be forgotten. Edith foresaw, sadly, that she would become an embarrassment.

He regretted, as he did so many times these days, the structure of the working day. Without that he was truly alone, a condition he would not allow to become pathetic, but a condition nonetheless which caused him much grief.

It is not true that Satan makes work for idle hands to do; that is just what he doesn't. Satan should be at hand with all manner of glittering distractions, false but irresistible promises, inducements to reprehensible behaviour. Instead of which one is simply offered a choice between overwork and half-hearted idleness.

As my love for her grew more poignant and more threatened my impatience and my weariness grew.

The women he had chosen, and who had, in one way or another, decided against him, had been more far-sighted than himself, and had discerned in his unremarkable courtship the prospect of a lifetime of boredom, though he had thought to provide them with everything that they desired. But they had desired an excitement which he could not provide. Now he recognized that they had been right to do so.

He knew that he did not make Harriet happy, but tended to disregard this. Happiness was what young people wanted; at his age he knew that comfort was more important. He had made her comfortable, and in that he was prepared to take a grim pride. After all, nobody else had done as much.

We were both dutiful, of course, my mother because she was a dutiful woman: I myself felt less humble but knew that life was only simple when one concurred with the wishes of others. In itself this is a dangerous weakness, but it seemed obligatory at the time.

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.

Perhaps most women did. Perhaps most women had unfulfilled life left in them, and sought a way to use it.

She had been unprepared for old age to render her so harmless. It was as if her sins had been wiped away, leaving only concealment in their place.

Men can bury their past. An unmarried woman is her past. Whereas a wife has a social position. A spinster has none.

But there comes a time when books let you down. Surely that time had not arrived? But in comparison with a living presence there is no contest.

For they themselves were still beautiful, designed for a more beautiful life than the one in which they found themselves becalmed. She saw that they were more stoical, had more depth, than she had ever perceived.

Women, after pursuit on his part, had found him disappointing in a way he had never fully understood. His appearance, he supposed, was misleading: he was tall, and to all intents and purposes agreeable to look at, but his longing — for home, for love, for consolation — let him down.

My mistake was to lie in his arms moist-eyed with tenderness and gratitude, when the correct stance would have been a certain detachment, an irony, as if to imply that he would have to love me to a much higher standard to convince me that I had to take him seriously. I should have found such a tactic odious, but now I see that it is sometimes necessary to meet withdrawal with withdrawal, dismissal with dismissal.

Although he had been found attractive enough by women, he knew he had little to offer beyond his own conformity. But this stranger, who had sought his advice, seemed to regard him as a normal human being.

Edith laid down her pen. It was all very well to write up Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, but she was still left with that memory of the two women lovingly entwined as they saw her to the door to say goodnight. For there was love there, love between mother and daughter, and physical contact, and collusion about being pretty, none of which she herself had ever known.

Strangely my husband had more in common with my parents than I had; all were on a lifelong mission to deny the truth, the truth being that they were furiously disappointed.

She was fifty, a difficult age for letting go, still young enough to have ambitions and desires but with fewer opportunities of satisfying either.