She remembered the tale she had told to herself of the young woman carrying the packet containing the deaths of Pete and Petey, the young woman walking endlessly in grim weather across the moors, with...

For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she...

God," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible-laughable, laughable-and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It...

There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They...

You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.""What I can't see-what I really can't see-is why everyone doesn't ask themselves that, all the time . How can these people bear to go to church...

UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters' education as seriously as his sons'. Humphry said that Dorothy-and Griselda-were...

Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go...

Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.

Suppressing natural feelings, Methley said, in the end distorted both mind and body. And excluding them from the consideration of novelists distorted the novel, infantilised it, turned good fiction...

Ah," said Florence, grimly. "A woman has to be extraordinary, she can't just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can't have a...

The truth is," said Florence, "that the women we are-have become-are not fit to do without men, or to live with them, in the world as it was. And if change, and don't, there will be no help for us.

She was called Maria. She was a Maria Magdalena who washed away sins, and she was Venus Anadyomene to me, though she was ill-nourished I think since birth, my artist's eye saw she was puny, though my...

Dorothy looked at everything as though it might vanish. The bright daily pottery, the spice-jars, the sweep of the staircase, the pigeons in the stable yard. What had been real was now like a thick...

I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?""No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.

His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with...

Pomona's Tom's age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name-so dangerous, don't you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.

How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost...

There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.

He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn't give up their wrath, even if they...

Dorothy did feel threatened. Whose child was or wasn't she? Almost unconsciously, she detached her-self a little from love. She would be canny. She would not invest too much passion in loving her...

The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and...

I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn't easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there's the problem of being different sexes. I...

No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull.

Harm can come about without will or action. But will and action can avert harm.

It was hard for a man and a woman to be fiends with no under thought or glimpsed prospect of sex. They wanted to be friends. It was almost a matter of principle. She was as intelligent as any Fellow...

Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here...

Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in...

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like...

...failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and...