In Certain Circles Quotes

“How unfair to everyone that the knowing of one person, the separation, should so poison and diminish every other association.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“What makes men superior is that they don’t—on the whole—stop functioning forever because of another person. They lack this built-in handicap, and are they lucky!”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“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 . . . .”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“What is it about someone genuine that makes other people want to crucify him in some tiny-seeming way? Someone has probably written the reason down in a book. But no one takes any notice, if we do know.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“I can't see the world as a great hospital with us all nursing and pitying each other.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“But sooner or later people have to take up their own lives, not disperse them out as though they were knitting wool that a clever knitter might handle better.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“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.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him because of them.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles

“If we lived forever, there would be time to recover from mistakes of twenty years duration.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, In Certain Circles