Quotes from Wendy W. Fairey

She said, "But you can't skate in a sari." Razia [her friend] was already lacing her boots. "This is England," she said. "You can do whatever you like.

Men are children," my mother instructed me. To her they always seemed pitiable, easily manipulated creatures, good for sex, to be sure, but in important matters not to be counted on.

Karl Marx himself spoke to her and said, "Sheilah, arise, you have nothing to lose but your mediocrity.

In "The Decay of Lying" Oscar Wilde asserts that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

The girls who choose Bryn Mawr," I said, "have often been outcasts and misfits. When they come to Bryn Mawr, they're transformed." And I set forth my theory of our empowerment in our collective oddity.

The answer the person was looking for was that Bryn Mawr enrolled more international students than other colleges did.

Madame Merle says, "I don't pretend to know what people are meant for. . . . I only know what I can do with them.

And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to the ex-East End orphan named Lily Shiel. Just what to hand her, I'd be hard put to say.

I wonder if because of my reading I have lived more fully or in some ways failed to live, at least in my own time and place.

My feeling is that Marriage #2 is usually a huge improvement on Marriage #1—in my case, certainly, and I hope in yours—something you embark upon with much more wisdom and with your eyes open. So good luck and all happiness to you both.

When I was a college dean, another job people take seriously, I think I kept signaling that I held myself at an ironic distance from the role.

That may be why, ultimately, I was fired.

nearing the end of a long teaching career, knowing I am in many ways ordinary yet still striving to count myself heroic.

a young man whose birth, wealth, and consequent leisure made many habits venial which under other circumstances would have been inexcusable.

a man who has the strength of character to leave off when he has only ruined others, is a reformed character.

Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love,

The highest "calling and election" is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious clear-eyed endurance.