"History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence."

"Helen racked her brains. Advice? Surely they needed advice? Of course they needed advice; she reviewed, in a flash, the whole unsatisfactory condition of Greystones, of her state of mind, of life itself. How can we stop the drain flooding whenever it rains? Why do I have to feel guilty because my mother has died? How can I achieve a comforting complacency?"

"Don't you ever realise," said Helen, "that the way we live is unlike the way other people live?" "On the whole I should have thought that was cause for satisfaction."

"This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction--the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected, and at the mercy of contingent events."

"What she was retreating from was any profundity of feeling and therefore any commitment more intense than light church attendance and an interest in roses.... History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out."

"Other people's houses always intrigued her by the contrast they offered to Greystones; she would see suddenly -- with detached interest and quite without envy or criticism -- the extent to which other people's preoccupations differed from her own."

"Her face, suddenly, contorts. The lips pinch and tighten. A hand crawls across the sheet. Lisa says, 'Are you all right?' 'No," says Claudia. 'But who is?"

"All my life, she thought, I have let things pass me by."