“...nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see? It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.” LifeDeathDyingSicknessDeathbed Book:Sabine Source: Sabine
“Where is the pain when your pride is wounded? And why do we say that: wounded? There is no gash, no blood, not even a scratch. Which part of us hurts? The brain cells? The neurons? What, for goodness' sake, what?” PrideLogicWounded Pride Book:Sabine Source: Sabine
“Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old.” LoveGivingSacrificeCharityAffectionCaringCompanionshipYoung Love Book:Sabine Source: Sabine
“Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it's doing to her innards, poor wretch, think of the strain on her spine when she goes over the fences.” FeminismHorseback Riding Book:Sabine Source: Sabine
“(But does time honour things? Sabine would teach me to ask. How? Why? And if it does, ought it to go on doing so? And for how long?)” TimeTraditionsTime Honoured Book:Sabine Source: Sabine
“Sabine used to maintain that preparation for a dance is comparable to what goes on in the back room of a butcher's shop: the meat for consumption is sliced and dressed and put in nice little paper packages, ready for the kitchen.” DatingDance Book:Sabine Source: Sabine