“I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool, might do well enough for the honeymoon; but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bosom, a half-idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal- nay, my idol- to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt!”

“That’s why I read, as a stranger,My being as if it were pages.Not knowing what will comeAnd forgetting what has passed,I note in the margin of my reading What I thought I felt. Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”God knows, because he wrote it.”

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know...I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

“I think the trick to living fully,” I said, thinking through each word, “is to appreciate what we have, day byday, regardless of what we know might come our way.” I took a breath and slowly looked from one of myparents to the other. “If I live in fear of what might be, how can I truly live my life to the full in the present? Andif I do not give myself to the day, to hope, to life, what do I miss?” I raised my eyebrows and shook my head.“Life itself, I think. At least the way I wanna live it.”

“It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did to me, and that he’d been punished for it, and I might as well concentrate on the rest of my life, because over that…I had some control and I could decide what to do. I could change it over; I could become anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.”

“The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's business after all but her own, my uncle's face darkening with blood as he spoke, my mother's fair fine skin pink as if smarting yet still I persisted, for I thought it such a horror, such a grief, yes and an embarrassment too, I said, "She's made a prison of this house, it's like she's a nun, it must be to punish herself," and my mother said quietly, angrily, "You don't know - what do you know! People do what they want to do.”