Shall There Be Womanly Times?

How Easily This Unthinking Family Love Was Forgotten.

All This Happiness On Display Is Suspect... If They Think - And They Could Be Right - That Continued Torture And Summary Executions, Ethnic Cleansing And Occasional Genocide Are Preferable To An Invasion, They Should Be Sombre In Their View.

I Like To Think That Each Book I Start Is A Completely New Departure But I’ve Learned That Whatever You Do, Readers Will Have No Difficulty Assimilating It Into What You’ve Done Before.

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

Watching Him During The First Several Minutes Of His Delivery, Cecilia Felt A Pleasant Sinking Sensation In Her Stomach As She Contemplated How Deliciously Self-destructive It Would Be, Almost Erotic, To Be Married To A Man So Nearly Handsome, So Hugely Rich, So Unfathomably Stupid. He Would Fill Her With His Big-faced Children, All Of Them Loud, Boneheaded Boys With A Passion For Guns And Football And Aeroplanes.