Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man. – 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
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has. – Anita Brookner
In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. – Anita Brookner
She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes. – Oliver Goldsmith
Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the fathers curse, mothers moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks. – Emma Goldman