“There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity.Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”

“Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity.Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”

“Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”

“Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her...”

“A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.”

“She cannot remember her mother's face... This is the woman who brought her into the world... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning.”