Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world...

Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it....

guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.

Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven...