“The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.”

“Two great problems hang over the world. War must disappear, and conquest must continue. These two necessities of a growing civilization seemed to exclude each other. How satisfy the one without failing the other?”

“Teasingly she took the apple from his mouth. Juice ran down his chin. Slowly, deliberately, she leaned over and licked the sweet juice from his chin.
I will have to admit though, that I will never look at an apple in quite the same way.”

“How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?”

“Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.”

“How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. Rights are not things which grow by using the multiplication table. here are two men. If there are such things as rights, these two men must evidently start with equal rights. How shall you, then, by multiplying one of the two, even a thousand times over, give him larger rights than the other, since each new unit that appears only brings with him his own rights; or how, by multiplying one of the units up to the point of exhausting the powers of the said multiplication table, shall you take from the other the rights with which he started?”

“There is no word for our kind of friendship. Two people who don't
see each other a lot, but can make each other effortlessly happy”

“The difference between friendship and love is how much you can hurt each other.”

“Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: "One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.”

“This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”