“To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.”

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

When I do something stupid with money and lose it, I call that Stupid Tax. I have paid so much Stupid Tax that I am expert.

Money alone isn’t enough to bring happiness… happiness is when you’re actually truly ok with losing everything you have.

When we lose a piece of love we were holding so close to our heart and our soul for so long. We sometimes wonder if it will return the same or differently or has it fallen beneath the settling of our past.

It’s okay to lose; just don’t lose the lesson.

I’m in a constant state of finding myself then losing her all over agin. – the cycle.

Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;!

If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.