“Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph; she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain that he spared her female judgement no ounce of his male muscularity.”

“When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she'd made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and a failure.Her judgement of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead - and who was not?”

“Its sound in her soul was a distant fast train. Love did not bring happiness, it did not last, and it ended in pain. She did not want to believe this, and she was not certain that she did; perhaps she feared it was true in her own life, and her fear had become a feeling that tasted like disbelief.”

“She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him awayfrom the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at himwith eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face,her fragile figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did notturn him from his purpose of helping her.”

“Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.”

“The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.”