Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him.

Time is how you spend your love.

Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favourite clothes... She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it or when to just put it down. (~of Clara Bowden)

How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don’t want your heart! I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!'He looked confused: 'A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.

Ludzie nie zaklepują sobie innych ludzi. Podejmują świadomą decyzję, że będą z nimi. To wymaga wiary. Rysujesz koło na piasku i zgadzasz się w nim stać, i wierzyć w nie.

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.