Wealth & Money Quote by Anita Brookner

Brookner’s sentence lands like a gloved slap: polite, precise, and meant to sting. The parallel structure promises balance, then quietly reveals a hierarchy of power. “Rich men” don’t “think” in arguments or systems; they “think in anecdotes” - pocket-sized stories that flatter the teller, tidy up complexity, and convert lived reality into a conversational asset. Anecdote is the currency of those for whom experience is curated: travel, deals, dinners, mishaps that end with a punchline and, crucially, control. It’s a way of speaking that dominates a room without ever having to justify itself.

Then she pivots to “simple women,” and the cruelty is in the word “simple”: not stupid, exactly, but socially constrained. If the rich man reduces life to entertaining fragments, the woman is forced into “biography” - the long arc of a person’s life, reputations, attachments, sacrifices. Biography is what you track when you don’t own the plot; you survive inside other people’s timelines. It’s also how women have historically been assessed: not by what they think, but by what happened to them, who they belonged to, what their story “means.”

Brookner, a novelist steeped in social observation, isn’t endorsing these categories so much as exposing them. The symmetry is bait; the subtext is indictment. Class and gender become not just identities but cognitive styles: the wealthy man’s freedom to be episodic, the woman’s obligation to be coherent. In one sentence, she sketches a whole room of English manners where power talks in charming fragments and powerlessness learns to narrate itself.