“She had not made a decision to give up sex, only the clamor of romance, because it was exhausting her, doing her no good and too much harm...”

“Betsy hadn't had sex, actual; sex-sex, full sex, in two hundred and fifty-three days. She decided on her thirty-seventh birthday that she wouldn't sleep with anyone unless it was in the context of a committed relationship which had some sort of future, and she was only gradually coming to the realization of what happens when a woman her age makes a decision like that: she never has sex again.”

“There's an independence about Mary - she's not influenced by anyone and she's very much her own person, she makes her own decisions. I understand her because I'm one of three girls too and I've always been defiant that I didn't want to do what they did.”

“Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy”

“She wished he’d stop touching her. Not because she didn’t like it but because she liked it far too much. It made her hunger for things that could never be hers. And if someone went hungry for too long, they started to starve. Started to hurt.”

“because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner.”