Quotes from book

The Wheel of Fortune

“Recovering from an ill-starred romance is, after all, to anyone of sufficient will-power and self-respect, purely an attitude of mind.”

“He wasn't just being selfish, he was being realistic. Marriage would have been very difficult if not downright impossible.'
'Marriage is always very difficult if not downright impossible,' said my father.
'Oh Harry, for God's sake forget I mentioned the group therapy! Run off and listen to a string quartet!”

“True doppelgä ngers should never meet face-to-face, you know.”

“But never mind, all the best heroines are beautiful orphans, abandoned to their fate, and the one thing that's certain about my situation is that I'm going to be a heroine when I grow up.'
'Can I be a hero?'
'Well, I suppose you can try. But you'll have to try very hard.”

“… we have to be kind, we have to be charitable and we can't condemn people just because they get in a mess…even the best people can get into ghastly messes,…we must never judge other people too harshly because although they can make awful mistakes they can still be very nice people.”

“To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging.”

“There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high.”

“Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.'
'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!'
'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.”

“The one advantage of being childless is that one can choose one's children and so avoid the bizarre game of chance in which one passes one's best — or one's worst — genes to one's poor innocent offspring.”

“What a bloody jungle income tax is! It's a wonder we don't all go on strike and refuse to pay.”

“Kester wrote about people and since human nature doesn't change his observations hadn't dated.”

“I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.”

“Little girls don't stay playmates. Little girls become big girls and big girls become sweethearts.”

“Life's for living, not for mourning … Live in the present, not the past.”

“Christ, all you psychiatrists think about is sex — sex, sex, sex, sex, sex …”

“One must be rational about such matters and being rational need not mean being cold.”

“Man cannot live on charm alone, and an ambitious man cannot live on anything less than wealth, good social connections and substantial political influence.”

“Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again … To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive.”

“The English don't have opinions about the Irish. They have prejudices.”