MARGARET MILLAR

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans.

Perfect young men don't get murdered, they don't even get born.

The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

Common sense is a vastly overrated virtue. I myself prefer the spark of genius.

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

Shrews are made, not born.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.

When someone gives me three reasons instead of one, I'm inclined not to believe any of them.

Don't borrow trouble. The interest is too high.

The sun was shining like a congratulation.

I didn't mind giving up carnality, jewelry and red meat in return for comradeship and an afterlife.

If you go around looking for accidents, asking for them, they can't be called accidents any more.

The world of maps is nice and flat and simple. It has areas for people and areas for monsters. What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves; that we are all whirling around in space together and there isn't even a graceful way of falling off.

Private problems don't constitute an excuse for bad manners.

Any good marriage involves a certain amount of play-acting.

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

I've reached the age where anyone who lets me talk seems like an old By listening to my memories, you have become part of them.

the smell of lilacs crept poignantly into the room like a remembered spring.

To the uneducated eye, as to the incurious mind, much of the world is in darkness, and a thousand songs are lost on the unlistening ear.

The day will probably come when you can tell everything about a person from his dreams except his age and weight.

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

the emotions at death, as at birth, are instinctive and primitive.