“She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman...”

“A 'career woman,'" Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. "A spinster," she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. "Perhaps you will never marry," Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. "Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,'" Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. "It was good enough for Jane Austen.”

“Slattern! What a wonderful new word. 'Slattern,' I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.'Yes, slattern,' Bunty says firmly. 'That's what she is.''Not a slut like you then?' Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed.”

“Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.”

“Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.”

“Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”

“She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.”