Anita Brookner

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

— Anita Brookner

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

— Anita Brookner

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.

— Anita Brookner

“Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then.”

— Anita Brookner

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

— Anita Brookner

When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.

— Anita Brookner

I am 46, and have been for some time past.

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way…

— Anita Brookner

“Fortunately, common sense asserted itself and I vowed that I should never wait for anyone again.”

— Anita Brookner

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the…

— Anita Brookner

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

— Anita Brookner

“Hartmann had the ideas and Fibich did the worrying: it suited them both perfectly.”

— Anita Brookner

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of…

— Anita Brookner

I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles…

— Anita Brookner

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is…

— Anita Brookner

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired,…

— Anita Brookner

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends…

— Anita Brookner

“We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh;…

— Anita Brookner

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise…

— Anita Brookner

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention…

— Anita Brookner

“I could not, somehow, make contact with any familiar emotion. As I lingered in front of a lighted window, apparently beguiled by…

— Anita Brookner

“[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments…

— Anita Brookner

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for…

— Anita Brookner

You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I…

— Anita Brookner

“She leaned back in her chair and raised her face to the sun, mildly intoxicated, not so much by the wine as…

— Anita Brookner

“It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your…

— Anita Brookner

“My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that…

— Anita Brookner

“But it was a significant exercise, for it meant that I considered myself worthy, as I had never done before. That change…

— Anita Brookner

“I remember at that time I went to the hairdresser's. I did this regularly, but I remember that visit for two particular…

— Anita Brookner

“They sat islanded in their foreignness, irrelevant now that the holiday season had ended, anachronistic, outstaying their welcome, no longer necessary to…

— Anita Brookner

“A woman owes it to herself to have pretty things. And if she feels good she looks good. You are wrong if…

— Anita Brookner

“It seemed to me that I, rather than he, had brought this about, and my despair was extreme. For now that I…

— Anita Brookner

“I reminded myself of someone, but someone I had not seen for a long time.”

— Anita Brookner

“[...] no man is free of his own history.”

— Anita Brookner

I think you always feel braver in another language.

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner