Quotes from Anita Brookner

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

as if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid

In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home.

death is only a small interruption.

The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself.

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

You have no idea how promising the world begins to looks once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish. It is the simplest thing in the world to decide what you want to do - or, rather, what you don't want to do - and just to act on that.

no man is free of his own history.

Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.

I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchfulness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need never to admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them.

Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.

No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.