I wasn’t good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.

Marriage isn’t a love affair. It isn’t even a honeymoon. It’s a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they’ve worked at anything in their lives before. If...

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.

There’s a war on. We don’t know how anything’s going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she...

It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever

What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows...

She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and...

He’s threatening to breed polo ponies, but he’s always been a man of great ideas, but little action, so I don’t suppose he will.

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation....

Before Elfrida Phipps left London for good and moved to the country, she made a trip to Battersea Dogs’ Home, and returned with a canine companion. It took a good, and heart-rending, half hour of...

For he was drinking too much. Not uncontrollably nor offensively, but still he seldom seemed to have a glass out of his hand.