Emotions weren't like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

Being constantly with children was like wearing a pair of shoes that were expensive and too small. She couldn't bear to throw them out, but they gave her blisters.

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction.

The prize I value most was given to me 60 years ago. I was named the girl with the cleanest fingernails.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Women are programmed to love completely, and men are programmed to spread it around. We are fools to think it's any different.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

If I you were able to count all the snowflakes outside

We should have high expectations of our children, but politicians should not tell teachers how to meet them.

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

For the entire Desiderata go to Inspirational Poems page

Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.

T'was a thief said the last kind word to Christ. Christ took the kindness and forgave the theft.