“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. ”

“What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?”

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”

“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.”