An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

She had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love.

You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.

I can never see why people should be jealous. After all, youth isn't a matter of privilege, we all get the same share of it. Some people may be born at an easier time or be richer or more privileged than others, but that hasn't anything to do with being young

Beauty is intellectually confusing; it sabotages common sense.

A court of law is not constituted to establish the truth.

Why not stay in Cambridge for a week or so and let me show you the city? Sophie would let you have her spare room.’ ‘No thank you, Hugo. I have to get back to town.’ There was nothing in town for her, but with Hugo there would be nothing in Cambridge for her either.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.

Every time she opened that delicious mouth I was expecting her to illuminate life. I think I could have spent all my life just looking at her and waiting for the oracle.

Death is the least important thing about us.

All Cambridge suicides were brilliant. But about this one there could be little doubt. Sir Ronald’s death would probably raise him to the status of genius.

They were having no difficulty in believing her because she was telling the somewhat improbable truth. Now that she was about to lie, they would go on believing her.

There were moments, usually on a sunny Easter morning, when she wished that she could with sincerity call herself a Christian; but for the rest of the year she knew herself to be what she was – incurably agnostic but prone to unpredictable relapses into faith.

Like doctors, the police were kind and condescendingly gentle to the uninstructed, keeping inviolate their awful knowledge. This body, while it breathed, had been more important than others. It wasn’t important now, but it could still make trouble for them.

The police talked, not in whispers, but in confident normal voices unsubdued by death. They were professionals doing their job, working easily to the prescribed routine. They had been initiated into the mysteries of violent death; its victims held no awe for them.

He had rested the pistol on the bark between them and had mumbled at her through the bread and cheese. “How would you shoot yourself behind your right ear? Go on, Cordelia—show.

Love is more destructive than hate. If you must dedicate your life to something, dedicate it to an idea.