Friends and Lovers Quotes

“Well, a man’s life is divided into two parts: there is his work and there is his own private life. Two small worlds which he has to make for himself. And it is only when he is old, and the time for decision is over, that he may realize he did not need to neglect one for the other. For if he concentrated too much on one of them, then he really confused their purposes. He had thought that either a successful career was life, or life itself was a career. He hadn’t realized that his work and his own private life should be given the same amount of thought, that they should grow along with each other, each influencing the other, each developing the other. Without that balance, he will find himself an incomplete man. That’s the tragic thing about age: to realize you have somehow never seen what is happiness until it was too late to start building it up. For it has to be built. Pleasure is a simple thing: you can choose it, buy it, even have it as a gift. It only depends on your taste. But happiness is much more complicated; you have to build it yourself.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? 'We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don't even notice the audience.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“It seemed monstrous that people who could only afford cheap houses should find themselves automatically surrounded by ugliness.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“He passed the first six houses with sadness rather than distaste. They tried so hard, he thought. The Crescent in Edinburgh had been a row of houses all very much alike, too. But similarity, when it has money behind it, becomes a solid wall of convention, of permanence, even of defiance. Similarity, conceived and born in poverty, becomes an inferiority complex.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“Edward Fane climbed heavily into bed, with the boredom of a man who has long learned to expect no pleasure there.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers