Mark

“But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

“She had that look - scared and sort of paralysed but frantic underneath - that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.”
― John Banville, Christine Falls

“She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again