Anita Brookner Quotes

I love women. My life revolves around them.

All the women in my life have really made my life what it is, and I feel so fortunate, so whole because of them.

But there's so many things in life like women, like children, like God and family that transcends the world of hip-hop.

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

[I have] been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another.

I wonder what it's like to have that much power over a boy. I don't think I'd want it - it's a lot of responsibility to hold a person's heart in your hands.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

Marrying the first person who offers you a decent position in society. Love can wait.

When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.

Women give us solace, but if it were not for women we should never need solace.

The good ones go, if you wait too long. So you should go, before you stay too long.

In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.

When you look around at the six people that you spend the most time with, that's who you are. I think that in making those decisions in who you are going to be married to, who your friends are going to be, those are really huge, critical, life decisions. Who gets to talk to you everyday, is almost like the food that you eat. It is a very huge critical situation to choose who the people are that you are spending your life with, spending your time with and who you are choosing to give your love and everything to.

Women polish the silver and water the plants and wait to be really needed.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

Love, and love alone, is capable of giving thee a happier life.

How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Getting love is a very small experience. It is the experience of beggar.

An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.

For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.