“Hard work should be rewarded by good food.”

“He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life.”

“Having faith in God did not mean sitting back and doing nothing. It meant believing you would find success if you did your best honestly and energetically.”

“Aliena's brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.”

“It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost fo...”

“... people always credit prime ministers with more brains than they've got.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”