Best 9 quotes of Elizabeth Harrower on MyQuotes

For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained. Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar.

He loved to be so concentrated on.

He thinks as long as he can get up and go to work, no one should complain. He doesn't realise what he's like.

I was attracted to the strangeness of his mind as a psychiatrist might have been drawn to an interesting case. he wanted a resident analyst. Neither of us understood.

Oh. Yes. He's very bright. But the world, poor world, was as over-burdened with cleverness as with stupidity, and in a sense (lacking this), did they not amount to the very same thing? Oh, he's clever, Clare thought, but who's good? Who's good? Who is good?

So they had all had more troubles than she. Did that really make them superior? If two men were walking along the street and a brick fell on one, missing the other, did that make the injured one a better person?

The city, to her, meant a few particular blocks - the best blocks - lying together in a neat rectangle, linked by arcades and department stores; three streets one way, cut by four at right angles, bound at the top by gardens, self-enclosed at the bottom and either end. Three or four times a week she walked the streets of these blocks, smelt the coffee, the flowers, the rich expensive leather, the cosmetics.

Well, you know what men are. Anything new gets them in.

What I do understand is that at any point in a woman’s life she may come across something like a cement pyramid in the middle of the road. Another person. People. She’s capable of sitting there, convinced that it would be impossible to forsake her position, till it becomes a private Thermopylae. This sort of block was probably designed for the survival of our species, but the cost’s high. What makes men superior is that they don’t – on the whole – stop functioning forever because of another person . . . .