“Let Jesus be your boyfriend for now and save yourself from all that trouble.”

“God's dreams for us is far better than our own. He desires that we be able to maximize every potential and every gift that He has given us.”

“Doing your duty is having no sense of guilt about what you are doing.”

“And after that until the end, there was no relief from being a girl with chores that she wasn’t being paid for, a girl with no new sandals and a friend who wasn’t a friend but a mistress, and a family that wasn’t but people who owned her and ordered her about, and nothing at all but her pretty breasts and her round bottom and her misbehaving hair to help her feel any different.”

“People think that food cheers you up, that a doughnut cures all ills, but this only works for trivial complaints. When real disaster strikes, food chokes you.”

“I thought about suicide all the time, but it seemed toomuch effort, swallowing all those pills or jumping off things. If I'd lived out in the country I would have found a quiet stretch of railway track, and lain on it, fallen asleep, so that I would never have known when my last moment came. In London, the minimum tube fare had gone up so much that even to get near the line cost a fortune. Suicide seemed an extravagance I couldn't afford. People never leave you alone, either; I knew that if I'd tried to lie down on the line, any number of commuters would have pulled me off again, so that I didn't delay their train. There must have been murderers out there who wanted to kill, with no way of finding those who wanted to be dead. If there had been some way of contacting them, a date-with-death line, I would have called them to set up a meeting. The current ways of death seemed too haphazard; it was all left up to chance. Had Chance come up, tapped me on the shoulder, said "Oi, you - long black tunnel, white light, off you go," I wouldn't have complained. It was like having frostbite all over - feeling numb and in pain at the same time.”

“He was with me, beside me, inside me, and I did not care that my children were asleep, alone at home, or that the neighbors might come to know. He burned the fear out of me until all was left was desire.”