beth_arnold's Reviews (779)


“Women focus on what they lack, men on what they want.”

“Oh there are many ways to be mad,” she said, “love's the surest one.”

“I was a woman who loved a woman, chief among the womanly sins, like barrenness, and thinking.”

“her voice drifted like a bee between the flowers”

“How confident a man must be to write down his own musings, expecting anybody else to be interested in reading them.”

“No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.”

“You look at a single Black man and see all Black men, as if one Black man is the representative of every other member of his race, allowed neither personality nor passion”

“A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.”

“Ugly people have hope while pretty people have expectation.”

One of my favourite opening lines: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”