“One of them is a very familiar personage. Her name is “Mother Church.” She is, in many ways, an admirable and dedicated person, deeply concerned about her children, endlessly and tirelessly careful for every detail of their welfare. Her long experience has taught her to understand her family very well. She knows their capabilities and she knows their weakness even better. She is patient and imperturbable, quite unshockable (she has witnessed all of the considerable range of human wickedness in her time) and there are no lengths to which she ill not go to educate her family. She has a huge fund of stories, maxims and advice, all of them time-tested, and usually interesting as well. She is very talented, skilled din creating a beautiful home for her children; she can show them how to enrich their lives with the glory of music and art. And there is no doubt that she loves God, and wishes to guide her children according to his will.On the other hand, she is extremely inclined to feel that her will and God's are identical. In her eyes there can be no better, no other, way than hers. If she is unshockable, she is frequently cynical. She is shrewd, with a thoroughly earthy and often humorous shrewdness. She knows her children's limitations so well that she will not allow them to outgrow them. She will lie and cheat if she feels it is necessary to keep her charges safe; she uses her authority 'for their own good' but if it seems to be questioned she is ruthless in suppressing revolt. She is hugely self-satisfied, and her judgement, while experienced, is often insensitive and therefore cruel. She is suspicious of eccentricity and new ideas, since her own are so clearly effective, and non-conformists get a rough time, though after they are dead she often feels differently about them.This is Mother Church, a crude, domineering, violent, loving, deceitful, compassionate old lady, a person to whom one cannot be indifferent, whom may one may love much and yet fight against, whom one may hate and yet respect.”

“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.”

“And now she knew she could never find love in someone else. She knew the lines she treasured so long from the movie were wrong. There was no use searching for love in someone who was born for her. Even if he existed. Love existed in her own self. Inside her. But to comprehend it, to understand it, to awaken it, she needed the other person. Someone who would pull the right strings that made her sing, someone with whom she could share her feelings, her thoughts, her dreams. It was not just someone with whom she could grow old, someone with whom she could share the murmur of the brook.”

“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Grace Brisbane. There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books. She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she love one of them most of all.”

“On the day Contess Carolina Fantoni was married, only one other living person knew that she was going blind, and he was not her groom. This was not because she had failed to warn them. 'I am going blind,' she had blurted to her mother, in the welcome dimness of the family coach, her eyes still bright with tears from the searing winter sun. By this time, her peripheral vision was already gone. Carolina could feel her mother take her hand, but she had to turn to see her face. When she did, her mother kissed her, her own eyes full of pity. 'I have been in love, too,' she said, and looked away.”

“How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.”