She quite liked this aspect of her personality, the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.
Baths, she thought, were just like her relationships, all “ooh, ah” in the beginning and then suddenly, without warning, she had to get out, out, out!
One of the multitudes of exboyfriends had been a country music fan and left Gemma with an unfortunate passion for Tammy Wynette. It was like, Cat thought, he’d given her herpes.
Somehow she knew there would be an unspoken truce on their unspoken battle over God knew what when they were old. They could both surrender to their innate grumpiness. It was going to be a lovely relief.
It’s because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.
You okay, Mum?” said Rob.”I’m fine,” said Rachel. She went to reach for her cup of coffee and found that she didn’t have the energy to even lift her arm.
It’s about making a choice to make your marriage a priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.
If he could just have one more chance, he’d act like the man he’d always believed himself to be.
Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.
Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.
You can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you’re wrong, it can be something else entirely.
People can do what they like in the privacy of their own homes.
Not all mysteries are meant to be solved. Not all secrets are meant to be told.
You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes.
Women always reveal their deepest secrets to each other.
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family.
She felt hot liquid anger suddenly cool and harden into something powerful and immovable.
She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn’t linked to something awful that needed forgiving.
I didn’t have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn’t have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn’t have backup. I didn’t have insurance to cover a loss like this.
Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.
As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn’t experienced ten years of living.
She wanted to hug him and at the same time she kind of wanted to slap him.
When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.
Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.
Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.
When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.
There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene.
Just because a marriage ended didn’t mean that it hadn’t been happy at times.
All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?
She felt detached from all aspects of her life. She had no time anymore to feel. All that time she used to waste feeling, and analyzing her feelings, as if they were a matter of national significance.
We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.
Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces…Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.