Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. Fitzgerald was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, for her novel The Bookshop; and won the Booker prize in 1979 for her work, Offshore.

The Bookshop (1978)

 * The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself.

Human Voices (1980)

 * Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure, short of total abstention.

Innocence (1986)

 * There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics.


 * He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.