Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it. - Margaret Drabble

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 in defeat there is no peace.

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

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.