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Did all these kids come from perfectly happy families? Weren't any of them hiding something that was going on at home? They didn't seem to be. They didn't seem to have a thing on their minds but lunch and friends and lipstick.

When she grew up she was going to marry a man who came from a big, close, jolly family. He would get along with all of them—he'd be the same kind of man her father was, friendly and easygoing—and all of them would love Willa and treat her like one of their own.
She would have either six children or eight children, half of them girls and half boys, and they would grow up playing with their multitude of cousins.

Grilled cheese sandwiches were all he knew how to make. He fried them over high heat and they gave off a sharp, salty smell that Willa had learned to associate with their mother's absences-her sick headaches and her play rehearsals and the times she slammed out of the house.

This is getting tense!

An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.

Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

That parenting isn't a noun but an ongoing
process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.

Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, "Great. Maybe you can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza
for breakfast.
Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

They say that a person's personality is the sum of their experiences.
But that isn't true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we'd never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

"Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?"
"No."
"You're never more important than you are then."

You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they've been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.

Because that was a parent's job: to provide shoulders.
Shoulders for your children to sit on when they're little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven't yet realized that we don't actually know what we're doing.

How a sentence can give a whole personality description.
“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

But something about the whole setup strikes me as uncomfortably, shall we say, symbolic. See, I've always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you.
I keep asking myself: couldn't Thelma have found us a place with a few more levels to it?"

Only it was more like burrowing through the night, tunneling through with some blunt, inadequate instrument like a soup spoon, and she woke in the morning muddled and tired and convinced that she had missed some-thing. Now she thought what she had missed was her own grief. Why that rush toward forgetfulness? she asked herself. Why the hurry to leap past grief to the next stage?

She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there'd been a grown-up standing ready to take over—her sister or her husband or her father.

She had always been such a false child, so eager to conform to the grown-ups' views of her.

What liars poets and everybody were! They made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.

She had often wondered what Abélard meant, when he said that in their year of love he and Heloise had passed through all the stages and refinements of passion.[…]
The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.

Constance walked dimly on. From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insen-tience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees. They seemed a very power of silence, and yet, a vital presence. They too were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and given a potency of silence.

that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers.
Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

…an unimportant lie of silence.

They did not witness for themselves, but others did, the journey made to bring redemption; they only wonder why it was made, so faithfully and for so long. Why was the past belittled? Where did mercy come from when there should have been none left? They laud the mercy and silently applaud the figure at the funeral, but hearsay tells them nothing more.

Her tranquillity is their astonishment. For that they come, to be amazed again that such peace is there: all they have heard, and still hear now, does not record it. Calamity shaped a life when, long ago, chance was so cruel. Calamity shapes the story that is told, and is the reason for its being: is what they know, besides, the gentle fruit of such misfortune's harvest? They like to think so:

the oblivion that possessed him was his secret. There were many secrets in the asylum, a younger keeper said; in asylums everywhere there were secrets preciously guarded because there was so little else. Oblivion often was an inmate's last, his sole, possession.

The bedroom that had been like a grave during its unoccupied years was a grave again, its door closed, never entered.

Circumstances had shaped an emptiness in her existence; and love's ungainly passion belonged, with so much else, to the undemanding past.