“Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother’s place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.”

“Maybe it's just a daughter's job to piss off her mother.”

“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”

“It seems to me that the Pope's son, the Cardinal, is not in a condition for me to give him my daughter to wife. Make a cardinal who can marry and take off the hat, and then I will give him my daughter.”

“My mother says looking is the nature of wisdom.”

“Badly off as the men… were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.”

“What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult.”

“Once, I was my mother's daughter. Now I am my daughter's mother.”

“The miller's daughter of fourteen could not believe that high gentry behaved badly to their wives, but her mother instructed her — "Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness…"”

“A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.”