Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even i… - Margaret Drabble

As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems.

Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.

I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I'll be all right; I've got a few veg.