Abigail McCarthy quotes:

I don't think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend, or when an old relationship deepens into friendship, or when one finds an old friendship intact despite the passage of years and many absences.

By the very fact of public life, one seems to lose humanity in people's eyes.

growth requires purposeful division. Responsible dissent is the essence of democracy.

... men of power are seldom protected from their own infirmities by the men subordinate to them -- not even in the sad circumstances of mental exhaustion.

[What she told herself before interviews:] I am the way I am; I look the way I look; I am my age.

the apathy and inattention of the average citizen is beyond comprehension.

It is hard for many people today to make the distinction between religion and religiosity, the latter a dangerous parody of the former.

When I was young I thought of friendship as a matter of total loyalty and unchanging preference and I was often disappointed. But as an adult I had come to see that it was more the refraction of some total faithfulness and joy of which we all had some primordial notion. The exchange of trust and the experience of understanding between two people was like a sign or witness to the possibilitity of eternal caring and understanding and communication.

One is not allowed a grief for a life never lived. Yet one has buried the fruit of love, and a great deal of hope and many dreams.