Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

It's funny, isn't it, " Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two, " she said.

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited, he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

My issue with campaign finance is 100 percent disclosure. Wear a suit with patches from your big contributors. Depending on the size of the contribution, that's how big the patch should be.

The human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness.

Earnest is our dog. She senses instantly that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring nurturing instinct that all female dogs have, she tries to lick my ears off.

Preparation for life is so important. Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity. Opportunity is all around us. Are you prepared?

I would certainly choose my jobs depending on the actions of the character. I won't do anything that has to do with child abuse or women's abuse.

We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects.

If I'd never have picked up the first person, I'd never have picked up the 42,000 in Calcutta.

We walk alone through this world, but if we're lucky, we have a moment of belonging to something, to someone, that sustains us through a lifetime of loneliness.

My ego is really good. I don't need to watch myself on TV, like some others.