Anita Brookner Quotes

I know not which lives more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives.

Fear and niceness, the handmaids of all women, or more truly, woman its pretty self.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

People can't bear the idea that I could be sexual and provocative, and still be a nice person with a nice family and a nice husband, and have a career that could work, and be paid a certain amount of money.

Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband.

When a bride insists on telling her lover everything, I suspect she is looking for a father, not a husband.

What's for dinner is the only question many husbands ask their wives, and the only one to which they care about the answer.

High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.

I knew everything a woman hated even before I remotely knew anything a woman liked.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.

When I was young, if a girl married poverty, she bcame a drudge; if she married wealth, she became a doll.

To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!

I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure, unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in- and I am sure my dinners are good enough for her, since she is an unmarried woman of seven-and-twenty, and as such should expect little more than a crust of bread washed down with a cup of loneliness.

Ladies and gentlemen are supposed to be looked after by others, like children and pets.

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

There is a latent fairy in all women, but look how carefully we have to secrete her in order to be taken seriously. And fairies come in all shapes, colours, sizes and types, they don't have to be fluffy. They can be demanding and furious if hey like. They do, however, have to wear a tiara. That much is compulsory.

Marriage is one of the few institutions that allow a man to do as his wife pleases.

It's always fascinating to me, one, when they like to throw President [Bill] Clinton's behavior in Secretary [Hillary] Clinton's face, I've never seen anything like it before in my entire career, of watching a woman have to defend the behavior of her husband, because she chose to make her marriage work. That is just outrageous.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

Without the heroic, man has no meaning; without the economic, he has no sense. Economic man is most likely to be economic woman - a good wife, pulling the coat tails of her heroic husband, checking his extravagances of speech and action with words of caution and good sense. But without the heroic coat tails to pull, life for both of them would be dull and savorless indeed.

Tis the established custom [in Vienna] for every lady to have two husbands, one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties.

Tired, ashamed, and mortified, I begged to sit down till we returned home, which I did soon after. Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him ! O these fashionable people!

I married my husband who is thirteen years older, so I will always be a trophy wife for him.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.