Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn --the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.