Anita Brookner Short Quotes

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I became an adult too soon and paradoxically never grew up.

Anita Brookner
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

Anita Brookner
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

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

Anita Brookner
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

Anita Brookner
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Anita Brookner
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

Anita Brookner
Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared.

Anita Brookner
They were privileged children…they would always expect to be greeted with smiles.

Anita Brookner
I was brought up among the sort of self-important woman who had a husband as one has an alibi.

Anita Brookner
What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere. It is an art form in itself.

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

Anita Brookner
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Anita Brookner
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

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

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

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

Anita Brookner
Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

Anita Brookner
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and... you don't win the favors of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.

Anita Brookner
It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.

Anita Brookner
I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person she least plans to resemble: her mother.

Anita Brookner
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Anita Brookner
A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

Anita Brookner
You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.

Anita Brookner
Far from making me hard, writing has made me softer, more understanding, more observant, and perhaps more passive in the sense that other people and their opinion of me seems to matter less.

Anita Brookner