“Like most children, she came into the world assuming everyone was good, and spent the rest of her life discovering otherwise.”

“You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.”

“A good mother loves fiercely but ultimately brings up her children to thrive without her. They must be the most important thing in her life, but if she is the most important thing in theirs, she has failed.”

“She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life… Well she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in a real friend could do a world of good.”

“Books alone were not adequate preparation for life - as Mary was herself discovering. And by pointing this out, she was pointing a finger at those, like her father and Shelley, who sometimes insisted otherwise”

“Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.”