Quotes from Anita Brookner

In the books she favoured, but wistfully, women were unmasked, laid bare by a man who finally understood them. She knew that this was rubbish, but found the illusion so beguiling that she continued to embrace it as her own, did not realize, or perhaps failed fully to realize, that other women, even, perhaps, the women who wrote the novels, cherished the same illusion.

I simply want to live with someone so that I can begin my life.

They walked endlessly, hand in hand, talking about their respective childhoods. They were in fact like two children who have elected each other as best friend.

I have no lovers, if that is what you mean. I had them once, but that was when I was free.' 'One is never free. One has only the illusion of freedom. One is never free of obligations, whether explicit or implicit. The latter are the worst.

She was right: dignity was important. But so was the impulse to get rid of it, as he knew from his recent awakening.

You will find that you can behave as badly as you like. As badly as everybody else likes, too. That is the way of the world. And you will be respected for it. People will at last feel comfortable with you.

They had marveled then at the effervescence, the sophistication, as they sat in the Flore or the Deux Magots surveying glittering evening. Their supreme good fortune, in those far-off days, was to have been alike in their expectations; the naivete of youth had protected them from potential disappointment, not only with the adventure, but with each other.

All the deaths were natural, yet all had an aura of horror. It was their lives rather than their deaths that were regrettable, and all the frustrated love that had failed to sweeten their end.

Biliyor musunuz," dedi Edith, on dakika süren sessiz iniÅŸten sonra, "Åžu gülümsemenizi birazc?k sevimsiz buluyorum." Mr. Neville'in gülümsemesi yüzüne daha da yay?ld?. "Beni daha iyi tan?d???n?zda," dedi, "GülümseyiÅŸimin gerçekte ne kadar sevimsiz olduÄŸunu anlayacaks?n?z.

I, who found it so difficult to shed my beady isolation, must in fact never appear to be lonely.

That doctor of yours called it depression. Depression is a form of anger, or so I've read.' 'I'm not angry.' She looked at him wonderingly. 'Why on earth should I be angry?' 'Maybe you were angry without knowing it. Maybe anger is merely undigested experience.

I wanted, more than anything, a chance to be simple, once again, as I was meant to be, and as I had been long ago, a long, long time ago.

There must be some compensation for being an onlooker,' said Beatrice. 'The role is not always an enviable one.

His sleeplessness seemed to confine him to a ghetto, in which the forsaken, the forgotten, and the unsatisfied were his fellow inmates. It seemed to him that women in these situations could not possibly experience the same degree of loneliness.

For this was a land of prudently harvested plenty, a land which had conquered human accidents, leaving only the weather distressingly beyond control.

For that is how he saw me, she thought, and out of love for him that is how I tried to be.

The weather was still fine, but waning in conviction, as if its hold on heat and light were growing weaker.

Fortunately, common sense asserted itself and I vowed that I should never wait for anyone again.

I have been aware of a boredom, a restlessness, that no ordinary friendship can satisfy: only and extraordinary one.

But the fact that for the first time in her life she had managed to convince herself of her rights might embolden her to assert her wishes again.

She nodded back, and thought how limited her means of expression had become: nodding to the pianist or to Mme de Bonneuil, listening to Mrs Pursey, using a disguised voice in the novel she was writing and, with all of this, waiting for a voice that remained silent, hearing very little that meant anything to her at all. The dread implications of this condition made her blink her eyes and vow to be brave, to do better, not to give way. But it was not easy.

As she slid into sleep one fact remained with her, a fact that would not be dismissed. When he had held her in his arms, and moved into her, she had felt nothing, even though she was aware of his arousal. That would be the way of it now.

That instant proved to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting of a potential lover that was significant, but the second, the moment not of recognition but of confirmation, so that every other consideration is irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some point in the past but no longer had any currency in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and whatever the cost.

But books, she had found, were too powerful, and invariably misleading.