... I feared I might lose my faith. If you've never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you'll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering.

My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.

I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.

Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.