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“It seems to me that men and women have really hurt one another so much,nowadays, that they had better stay apart till they have learned to be gentle with one another again.”

“People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let's-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness,or fun, or the- best-ever.”

She loved men–real men. But, on close contact, it was difficult to define what she meant by ‘real’ men. She never met any.

“They were a pair–they had to be together. Yet quite soon they shrank from one another. This attachement of the will and the nerves was destructive.”

“She read psychologists who said everything was an attitude.Even the best of everything. But now she realised that, with men and women, everything is an attitude only when something else is lacking.”

“She adjusted herself, however, quite rapidly to her new conception of people. She had to live.It is useless to quarrel with one's bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.”

It seemed to wound her heels as she walked, the fear. The fear, the great cold fear of the base-born, her father, everything human and swarming. Like a great bog humanity swamped her, and she sank in, weak at the knees, filled with repulsion and fear of every person she met.

She had a curious reluctance, always, towards taking action, or making any real move of her own. She always wanted someone else to make a move for her, as if she did not want to play her own game of life.

‘For the moment she was hibernating in her oldness, her agedness. But in a minute her mouth would open, her mind would flicker awake and with her insatiable greed for life, other people's life, she would start on her quest for every detail.’

“And she would have the same contempt for Daddy and for Uncle Fred, as men, as she would have for old slobbery Rover,the Newfoundland dog. A great, sardonic female contempt, for such domesticated dogs, calling themselves men.”

“It is very much easier to shatter prison bars than to open undiscovered doors to life. As the younger generation finds out somewhat to its chagrin.”

They seemed so free, and were as a matter of fact so tangled and tied up. They seemed so dashing and unconventional, and were really so conventional, so, as it were, shut up indoors inside themselves.

Je dois célébrer l'anniversaire de mes propres sentiments, parce que je n'ai aucune réalité à commémorer. Il n'est pas possible de séparer le rêve de la vie; c'est bien la vie qui engendre le rêve, n'est ce pas?

“In her ramblings and her idleness she might only be a caricature of herself; but in her silence and sadness she was the very reverse of all that she had been before.”

Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney - and castles and abbies made usually the charm of those reveries which his image did not fill.

The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very tirsesome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.