“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”

“The beauty of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones — which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.”

“Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.”

“Pete had stopped the car at the bottom of a long brick driveway. Tina saw a large low house that stretched across the open space. It looked like an ordinary suburban house, with white painted cladding. She could see curtains in the windows. All of them were open. Tina could imagine Lockie’s mother walking into his room every morning to open the curtains and then staring at the empty bed where her son should have been.”

“In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives.”

“I believe the houses of the future will be...designed to welcome rather than to impress. People...will want homes in which every room is used every day and in which there are no wasted spaces--homes less like furniture stores or warehouses and more like nests.”